Imitation
Integrative Seminar
for the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain and Development
Psychiatry 272, Anthropology M234Q
Tuesdays 12-3:00
Winter,
2003
310 Haines Hall (Forum talks will be in
Haines 352)
Instructors: Alan P. Fiske, Marco Iacoboni, Marian
Sigman
Alan Fiske, 324B
Haines, 310-206-7719 or (study at home ) 310-265-9239, afiske@ucla.edu http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/
Office hours by appointment.
Marco Iacoboni,
265 Brain Mapping Center, 310-206-3992,
iacoboni@loni.ucla.edu http://www.cbd.ucla.edu/bios/iacoboni.html
Office hours by
appointment
Marian Sigman,
68-237C NPI, 310-825-0180, 310-825-8866,
Office hours by
appointment.
Participants
We welcome
participation by all interested graduate students, post-docs, and faculty. This seminar is required for new
participants in the FPR-UCLA Center from Culture, Brain, and Development (www.cbd.ucla.edu).
The required book, David Lancy, Playing on the Mother Ground,
and the reader, are available at the Ackerman UCLA Bookstore.
Purpose
The goal of this
seminar is to integrate knowledge across anthropology, neuroscience, and developmental
psychology to understand the interrelations of culture, brain, and development.
The focus of this course will be on imitation and its relations with theory of
mind, and autism. In particular we will discuss:
(1)
Development
of imitation in normal and autistic infants and children;
(2)
Neural
mechanisms of imitation, from single-unit data in nonhuman primates to neural
systems studies in humans with functional neuroimaging and neuropsychological
approaches;
(3)
Computational
and robotics approaches to imitation;
(4)
Imitation
as the core mechanism for development of cultural competence;
(5)
Imitation
as a human adaptive specialization;
(6)
The
cultural elaboration of imitation in schools in Cameroon;
(7)
Acquisition
of theory of mind in normal and autistic children;
(8) Neuropsychological
and imaging data on theory of mind and autism.
Method
The course
explores imitation from the perspective of culture, brain, and
development. We will explore how
imitation may be related to theory of mind and autism. Week 1 will be devoted to basic concepts of
anthropology, neuroscience, and developmental psychology. Weeks 2 to 7 will be
devoted to imitation from the perspective of the anthropologist, of the
neuroscientist, and of the developmental psychologist. Weeks 8 to 10 will be devoted to intentional
relations, theory of mind and autism. The forum speakers have been chosen
because their own research integrates across at least two of the three
perspectives.
Requirements
1. Two papers, one due February 11 and the other due around March 17.
2. Comments or conceptual queries on each
week’s reading, and follow-up questions for each Forum speaker. Reading comments should consist of two or
three paragraphs, raising fundamental issues about the readings, exploring
important methodological issues, or making connections with materials from the
other two disciplines. Questions for
Forum speakers should raise significant conceptual or methodological
issues. These comments and questions
should be posed on the class web discussion board by 3:00 PM the Monday before
the class session for which readings are assigned, and, for the Forum
questions, the following Monday.
We hope most Forum speakers will reply on the Discussion Board and we encourage seminar participants to
post responses to each other’s comments.
(BOL accounts are needed to post comments; please see Janet Tomiyama or
your department staff if you don’t have a BOL account.)
3. Participation in class discussion.
Grades will be
based one-half on written work, one-quarter on web-based discussion, and
one-quarter on class participation.
Week 1,
January 7
Basic
Concepts In Culture, Brain, And Development:
Their Interdisciplinary Study (Fiske, Iacoboni, Sigman)
Readings:
Horwitz
B, Friston KJ, Taylor JG (2000) Neural modeling and functional brain imaging:
an overview. Neural Networks 13:829-846.
LeVine, Robert A. 1984. Properties of Culture: An
Ethnographic View. In Richard A. Shweder & Robert A. LeVine, Culture
Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (pp. 67-87.) Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Week 2,
January 14
Comparative
Phylogeny of Imitation and its Implications for Human Cultural Transmission
Robert
Boyd, Forum Speaker
Readings:
Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd. The
Nature of Cultures, Chapters 4 and 5 Unpublished manuscript.
Week 3,
January 21
Imitation in
Human Development (Marian Sigman):
Readings:
Meltzoff,
A.N.& Moore, M.K. (1997), Explaining facial imitation: A theoretical model.
Early Development and Parenting, 6,179-192.
Forman,
D. & Kochanska, G. (2001). Viewing imitation as child responsiveness: a
link between teaching and discipline domains. Developmental Psychology, 37, 198-206.
Carpenter,
M., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. (2002). Understanding ‘prior intentions’
enables twp-year-olds to imitatively learn a complex task. Child
Development, 73, 1431-1442.
Week 4,
January 28
Learning languages by
heart: guided repetition in Koranic and public school in Maroua, Cameroon
Leslie
Moore, Forum Speaker
Readings:
Demuth, Katherine 1986 Prompting routines in the language socialization of Basotho children. In Language Socialization across Cultures. B. Schieffelin and E. Ochs, eds. Pp. 51-79. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Moerk, Ernst L. 1989 The fuzzy set called
"imitations". In The Many Faces of Imitation in Language Learning.
G.E. Speidel and K.E. Nelson, eds. Pp. 277-303. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Speidel, Gisela E., and Keith E. Nelson
1989 A fresh look at imitation in
language learning. In The Many Faces of Imitation in Language Learning.
G.E. Speidel and K.E. Nelson, eds. Pp. 1-19. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Eickelman, Dale F. 1978 The art of memory: Islamic education and
its social reproduction. Comparative Studies in Society and History 20:485-516.
Week 5,
February 4
Imitation Is
the Core Mechanism for the Development of Cultural Competence ( Alan Fiske)
Readings:
Lancy, David F. 1996. Playing on the Mother-Ground: Cultural
Routines for Children's Development. Guilford Press. (book available at the
Ackerman UCLA Bookstore).
For ethnographic and general background on the
Kpelle, see the following (source is Encyclopedia of World Cultures, copywrite Macmillan and HRAF): http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/135b/kpelle.htm
For
general information on Liberia, home of the Kpelle, see
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Country_Specific/Liberia.html
For current
news on Liberia, see this UN source:
http://www.irinnews.org/frontpage.asp?SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=Liberia
Also recommended (on reserve at YRL)
Gabriel Tarde, 1900. Les Lois de
L'Imitation; Etude Sociologique. Third Edition, revised and
augmented. Paris: Felix Alcan. (Tarde argued that a society is a
collection of individuals who imitate [or counter-imitate] each other, or who
imitate the same third party. The English translation is on reserve, as The
Laws of Imitation, translated from the 2d French ed. by Elsie Clews Parsons,
1962.)
Baldwin, James Mark 1911 The Individual and
Society; or Psychology and Sociology. Boston: Gorham Press.
(Wrote on imitation as the framework for sociality and cultural transmission.)
Fortes, Meyer 1938. Social and Psychological
Aspects of Education in Taleland. London : Published by the Oxford
University Press for the International Institute of African Languages and
Cultures. International Institute of African Languages and Cultures.
[Memorandum XVII]; Africa. Supplement. 11, no. 4. (Emphasizes
the ways cultural learning is integrated into everyday life, as children
observe and participate in daily activities.)
Week 6,
February 11
Sally Rogers, Forum Speaker:
Readings:
Charman,
T., Swettenham, J., Baron-Cohen, S., Cox, A., Baird, G. & Drew, A.
(1997).Infants with autism: an investigation of empathy, pretend play, joint
attention, and imitation. Developmental Psychology, 33, 781-789.
Rogers, S.J., Pennington, B.F. (1991). A theoretical
approach to the deficits in infantile autism. Development &
Psychopathology, 3 (2), 137-162.
Rogers, S. J.; Bennetto, L., McEvoy, R., Pennington,
B.F. (1996). Imitation and pantomime in high-functioning adolescents with
autism spectrum disorders. Child Development, 67 (5), 2060-2073.
Sigman,
M. D., Kasari, C., Kwon, J. & Yirmiya, N. (1992). Response to the negative
emotions of others by autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children. Child
Development, 63, 796-807.
Week 7,
February 18
Neural Mechanisms
of Imitation (Iacoboni)
Part I. Neural
systems for motor control
Part II. Neural
and computational mechanisms of human imitation
Part III. The neuroscience of understanding:
imitation, language, empathy
Readings:
Iacoboni, M.
(in press) Understanding others: Imitation, language, empathy. In Hurley, S.,
Chater, N.(eds.) Perspectives on Imitation: From Cognitive Neuroscience to
Social Science. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Rizzolatti
G, Luppino G(2001) The cortical motor system. Neuron 31:889-901.
Wolpert DM,
Ghahramani Z,Flanagan JR (2001) Perspectives and problems in motor learning.
Trends Cogn Sci5:487-494.
Jellema,
T., Baker, C.I.,Wicker, B. & Perrett, D.I. (2000) Neural representation for
the perceptionof the intentionality of actions. Brain Cogn, 44,280-302.
Weeks 8-10: Intentional Relations, Theory Of Mind And Autism
Week 8,
February 25
The
neuroscience of mindreading and autism
Mirella
Dapretto, Forum
Speaker:
Readings:
Frith, U.
(2001) Mindblindness and the brain in autism. Neuron, 32,
969-979.
Dawson, G.,
Carver, L., Meltzoff, A.N., Panagiotides, H., McPartland, J. & Webb, S.J.
(2002) Neural correlates of face and object recognition in young children with
autism spectrum disorder, developmental delay, and typical development. Child
Dev, 73,700-717.
Week 9, March
4
The
development of theory of mind and its dysfunction (Marian Sigman):
Readings:
Wellman,
H.M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind
development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72, 655-684.
Moses,
L.J. (2001). Executive accounts of theory-of-mind development. Child
Development, 72, 688-690.
Scholl,
B.J.& Leslie, A.M. (2001). Minds, modules, and meta-analysis. Child
Development, 72, 696-701.
Wellman,
H.M. & Cross, D. (2001). Theory of mind and conceptual change. Child
Development, 72, 702-707.
Baron-Cohen,
S, Leslie, A.M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a ‘theory
of mind’? Cognition, 21, 37-46.
Week 10,
March 11
John Barresi, Forum Speaker:
Readings:
Barresi, J. & Moore, C. (1996).
Intentional relations and social understanding. Behav Brain Sci, 19, 107-121.