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Emulation and Mimicry in School Students with Typical Development and

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Article in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders · July 2014

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J Autism Dev Disord
DOI 10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0 Pre-print author version of the paper published at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0
ORIGINAL PAPER
Emulation and Mimicry in School Students with Typical
Development and with High Functioning Autism
Luis Jiménez • María José Lorda • Cástor Méndez
Abstract Two samples of participants with typical
development (TD) and high functioning autism performed
an imitation task where the goal was of high or low salience,
and where the modeled action complied with or was
contrary to the end-state comfort (ESC) effect. Imitation was
affected by the ESC effect in both groups, and participants
with autism reproduced high salient goals as frequently as
did participants with TD, but they reproduced less of the low
salient goals. Participants with autism showed a reduced
tendency to reproduce those actions which were relatively
inefficient to reach the goals. The results are discussed in
terms of either a relative imbalance between emulation and
mimicry in autism, or a reduced tendency to overimitate.
Keywords Imitation Mimicry Emulation Automatic
imitation Overimitation
Introduction
Imitation is affected in Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC).
Despite a wide consensus concerning this general fact, the
question arises whether imitation difficulties could be taken
as a core symptom of ASC (Rogers and Pennington 1991;
Rogers and Williams 2006), or whether they should be
better construed as a consequence of other primary deficits,
such as the atypical distribution of attention over social and
nonsocial stimuli (Vivanti et al. 2008), or a specific
difficulty to understand the intentions of others (Cattaneo et
al. 2007).
Imitation, at any rate, is not a unitary process, and
imitation processes are probably not affected unitarily in
people with ASC. For example, it has been shown that
individuals with autism differ more from people with typical
development (TD) in the imitation of actions without a clear
goal, such as gestures or arbitrary movements, than in the
imitation of actions performed upon objects, and with
transparent goals (Wild et al. 2012; Williams et al. 2004). It
also has been argued that individuals with ASC show lesser
propensity to imitate in conditions of automatic imitation,
when imitation is not part of the explicit requirements of the
task (Giganti and Esposito Ziello 2009; Helt et al. 2010;
McIntosh et al. 2006; Senju et al. 2007), but that they could
be able to imitate at normal rates when they are explicitly
asked to do so (McIntosh et al. 2006), or even when they are
simply required to focus their attention on the models
(Magne´e et al. 2007; Press et al. 2010; Senju 2013).
However, even under explicit imitation conditions, it has
been reported that participants with ASC tend to imitate
differently, reproducing the goal rather than the style of the
demonstrated actions (Hobson and Lee 1999, see also
Hobson and Meyer 2006), and imitating the instrumental
parts, but not the less functional features of those actions
(Rogers et al. 2010). In contrast, participants with TD do
often ‘‘overimitate’’, that is, they tend to copy even those
action patterns which are obviously unrelated to the target
outcome (Horner and Whiten 2005; Nielsen 2006).
Automatic imitation and overimitation paradigms have both
proved to be useful to analyze non-explicit, or spontaneous,
imitation in autism. However, these two paradigms are
affected by somewhat complementary problems. Automatic
imitation, on the one hand, has been often confounded with
the effects of spatial compatibility, because imitatively
congruent demonstrations are usually presented at the same
relative location at which the target action should be
emitted, and vice versa (e.g., Spengler et al. 2010, see Heyes
2011, for a systematic description of the issue; Cook and
Bird 2012; Jiménez et al. submitted, for attempts to solve it).
On the other hand, studies of overimitation do often focus
on actions which are so obviously irrelevant to the
demonstrator’s goals that their reproduction seems to
depend more on an explicit decision to join the models in an
activity acknowledged to be ‘‘irrational’’ (e.g., Nielsen et al.
2013), rather than on an arguably automatic, or spontaneous,
facilitation of those actions. Indeed, it is interesting to note
that in one of the few studies of overimitation in which the
emphasis was put on performing the task as fast and
efficiently as possible, children with TD still copied the
unnecessary actions of the models to a large extent, whereas
participants with ASC showed a reduced effect of
overimitation (Marsh et al. 2013). In this context, the aim of
the present study is to further distinguish between goal-
driven and action-driven imitation effects in conditions
resembling those induced by the overimitation paradigm but
in which, instead of adding an action which is clearly
unrelated with the overall action goal, the model illustrates
either an optimal or a suboptimal way to achieve the same
goal.
Emulation and Mimicry
In addition to the social motivation to copy others’ actions
for the sake of sharing their experiences (Nielsen et al.
2013), imitation can be driven by many other processes,
including the activation of the observed action goals, and the
automatic facilitation of the motor representations involved
in reproducing those actions (Senju 2013). The results of the
studies which have been briefly reviewed above are
generally consistent with the existence of a relative
imbalance between these two latter processes in ASC, and
they fit nicely with a dual model of imitation proposed by
Hamilton (2008, see also Hamilton and Grafton 2007). In
her EP–M model, the author distinguished between an
emulation-and-planning (EP) route, which sustains
goaloriented and explicit imitation, and a mimicry (M)
route, which directly connects visual representations of an
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J Autism Dev Disord Final version of the paper published on line at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0
observed action with their corresponding motor plans.
According to the use made in this model of the terms
‘‘emulation’’ and ‘‘mimicry’’, we will refer to ‘‘mimicry’’
as the rote replication of an action as a consequence of
having watched it (cf. Tomasello et al. 1993). In contrast, we
will use ‘‘emulation’’ to refer to what Whiten and Ham
(1992) called ‘‘goal emulation’’, a process of observational
learning in virtue of which observers who see a model
yielding a particular goal will set about achieving the same
goal by their own means (Want and Harris 2002).
Results showing that people with ASC imitate less of the
non-functional features of an observed action (Hobson and
Lee 1999; Rogers et al. 2010), or that they often fail to show
automatic contagion of spontaneous gestures (McIntosh et
al. 2006; Senju et al. 2007), may be taken as indicating a
specific deficit in ASC involving the mimicry route.
However, because many of these deficits have been
observed in conditions in which the modeled actions
included facial expressions or emotional reactions, which
are known to be impaired in ASC, it is not at all clear
whether the observed differences should be attributed to a
deficit in automatic imitation, or to some other factors
pertaining to their specific attentional profile, which tends to
prioritize non-social information, and to favor the processing
of local features over the integrative processing required to
appreciate emotional expressions (Behrmann et al. 2006;
Mundy 1995). Thus, to further analyze the differences in
imitation that may exist between people with TD and ASC
in relatively simple tasks, not involving face processing or
emotional expressions, we considered a manipulative task
which may provide us with a useful tool to dissociate
emulation and mimicry.
The Imitative Bar Task and the End-State Comfort Effect
The original bar task was devised by Rosenbaum et al.
(1990) as a tool to demonstrate that, when participants are
instructed to perform a simple action requiring them to grasp
and relocate an object, people often plan their actions in
advance, so that their decision on how to grasp the object
depends crucially on their intended goal. Specifically, the
authors described the end-state comfort (ESC) effect, as a
general tendency to tolerate adopting a relatively
uncomfortable posture over the first stage of an action, if
this warrants the agent to finish the action in a comfortable
end state. In the context of the original bar task, participants
were presented with a bicolor bar that stood horizontally on
a central stand, and they were asked to put one its two
extremes on a platform. In these conditions, if participants
were told to put the right extreme on the platform,
righthanded people did typically grasp the bar with an
overhand grip, because in this way they could finish the
action with the hand in a comfortable, thumb-up posture. In
contrast, if their goal was to put the left extreme on the
platform, they would tend to adopt an underhand grip,
because that initial grasp would also allow agents to finish
their action in a comfortable thumb-up posture.
Hamilton et al. (2007; Experiment 3; see also Wo-
hlschlager et al. 2003 for a related precedent) presented the
bar task to two groups of children with TD and ASC, and
compared two conditions in which the actions were either
produced in response to verbal instructions or to a dem-
onstrator who acted in accordance with the ESC effect. The
results indicated that both groups of children were equally
able to reproduce the goals under both instruction or
demonstration conditions, and that both groups took
advantage of the imitation conditions to adopt the most
functional grip, which allowed them to finish the action in a
comfortable posture.
The results of Hamilton et al. (2007) suggested that the
benefits of imitation were preserved in children with ASC,
but they did not make clear whether, in these particular
conditions, those benefits were caused by either emulation
or mimicry. Specifically, because in this experiment the
model always adopted the most functional grip to achieve
the goal, it was not possible to assess whether the observers
reproduced the action just because watching it activated the
corresponding motor program, or because it made the
observed goal more salient, and therefore activated the
action planning strategies more suitable to achieve that goal.
Moreover, because in this study there were large differences
in chronological age between TD and ASC groups (their
average age were, respectively, 4 and 8 years old), and given
that action planning strategies have been reported to develop
shortly after the age of 4 (e.g., Weigelt and Schack 2010), it
was also possible that the effects observed in this study
could reflect different components of imitation in each
group, being mediated by emulation and planning processes
in the older participants with ASC, but relying on mimicry
for the younger participants with TD.
The Present Study
To sum up, the bar-task experiment of Hamilton et al.
(2007) suggests that imitation may be preserved in children
with ASC, but this interpretation is problematic because of
the large differences in chronological age between TD and
ASC groups, and because in their paradigm it was not
possible to distinguish between the effects of emulation and
mimicry. As a way to alleviate these concerns, we set up an
imitation bar task similar to that arranged in Hamilton et al.
(2007), but in which, over different trials, the model
illustrated either the most functional way to achieve the
goal, or a less functional one. We did not instruct
participants on whether the task goal was to imitate the
movements performed by the model, or just to reproduce the
same material outcome (i.e., to put the same extreme of the
bar on the target location). In these conditions, imitation of
the functional actions could result from any combination of
mimicry and emulation, but the imitation of suboptimal
actions could only arise from processes of mimicry or
overimitation.
In addition, we also manipulated the salience of the goal
by alternating the use of mono-color and bicolor bars. We
surmised that the use of a bicolor bar may lead participants
to focus on the material outcome, and therefore on the goal
of putting the same specific extreme of the bar on the
platform, regardless of the observed hand movements. In
contrast, the mono-color bar trials would make more
difficult for the observers to identify which extreme of the
bar had been actually located on the platform, and therefore
it might arguably lead participants to pay more attention to
the hand-movements, in an attempt to use them as a proxy to
reproduce the same material outcome. Thus, if participants
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J Autism Dev Disord Final version of the paper published on line at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0
with ASC had a specific difficulty with mimicry, we could
expect both groups to reproduce the outcome to a similar
extent when the goal was highly salient (i.e., with a bicolor
bar), but we would predict that participants with ASC may
have more difficulties in those cases in which the two
extremes of the bar were not explicitly marked, and thus
when they need to rely on the movements of the model to
ascertain which extreme was located on the target.
Finally, because planning, in general, and the ESC effect
in particular, have been shown to develop steadily with age
in healthy children (Thibaut and Toussaint 2010; Weigelt
and Schack 2010), an additional aim of the present study
was to test the expression of the ESC effect in these
imitation conditions with a relatively large sample of
children with TD, with ages between 7 and 16 years old. To
avoid the large discrepancies between participants’ mental
and chronological ages reported by Hamilton et al. (2007),
the ASC group included exclusively participants with a
diagnosis of high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome,
which showed cognitive abilities comparable to those found
in participants with TD of a similar age. The comparison
between groups was conducted on a reduced subsample of
those participants with TD, selected to match the
chronological age of the participants with ASC.
Method
All participants in the experiment completed tests of
vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Scale, Dunn et al.
1997) and fluid intelligence (Raven Progressive Matrices,
SPM, Raven et al. 2003). Their parents were asked to read
and sign an informed consent form, and they were requested
to fill the AQ questionnaire for children or adolescents, as
appropriate for their age (Auyeung et al. 2008; Baron-Cohen
et al. 2006). In addition, participants were presented with a
bar task similar to that used by Hamilton et al. (2007;
Experiment 3), and they also completed another automatic
imitation task (analogous to that used by Jiménez et al.
2012), which will be reported elsewhere (Jiménez et al.
submitted). The study was conducted in accordance with the
ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of
Helsinki, and was approved by the USC local ethical
committee.
Participants
Typically developing participants were recruited from two
local primary and secondary schools. Participants with ASC
were contacted through regional parental associations. They
all had received a previous diagnosis of high functioning
autism or Asperger syndrome by external professional
services, and they were reported to have a level of
intelligence within the normal range. We administered the
full battery of tasks and tests to a sample of 110 participants
with TD, and to 22 participants with ASC, with an age range
between 7 and 16 years old. Eleven participants (10 with TD
and 1 with ASC) were excluded from the final sample
because they were left-handed. We also excluded the data
from seven participants (3 from the group with TD and 4
from the group with ASC) owing to malfunction of the
experimental apparatus, or to insufficient cooperation from
the participants. The final sample thus consisted of 97
participants with TD (45 male), and 17 participants with
ASC (15 male). All participants in the ASC group, and none
in the group with TD, scored above the cut-off scores of 76
for the AQ-Child, or of 30 for the AQ-Adolescent tests. To
control for the scoring differences between these two
versions of the AQ tests we normalized the scores according
to the means and SD published by the authors of the
questionnaires (Auyeung et al. 2008; Baron- Cohen et al.
2006). Because the distribution of gender was markedly
uneven in the sample of participants with ASC, each
relevant comparison between TD and ASC groups was
preceded by an analysis of the effect of gender within the
TD sample, in order to discard that any observed difference
between groups could be accounted for in terms of that
gender distribution.
The full sample of participants with TD, covering a wide
range of ages between 7 and 16, was entered into a
preliminary analysis aimed at exploring whether the ESC
effect arose in this imitative version of the bar task, that is,
whether participants imitated comfortable end states more
often than non-comfortable end states. To gain a better
understanding of the possible modulatory role played by age
on the expression of this effect, we classified participants
with TD into four age groups, in terms of their education
cycle. Specifically, we made four intervals, corresponding to
Second Cycle of Elementary School (7–9 years old, N = 32),
Third Cycle of Elementary School (10–11 years old, N =
25), First Cycle of Secondary School (12–13 years old, N =
27), and Second Cycle of Secondary School (14–16 years
old, N = 13). We entered Age-Group as a factor in the
analysis, to assess whether there was any developmental
tendency in this task, either in the form of an increase in the
proportion of trials in which they responded by adopting the
most functional action patterns (ESC effect) or, conversely,
as an increase in the proportion of trials in which they
reproduced exactly the observed action patterns, regardless
of their functional value.
Even though participants in both TD and ASC groups
had been selected to fit within the same age range, the ASC
sample turned out to be composed of older participants
(average: 151 months, 95 % CI 137–164), than was the
sample with TD (average: 132 months, 95 % CI 127–137).
To avoid this difference in chronological age to affect the
scores obtained in the Vocabulary and Fluid Intelligence
tests, we relied on raw scores for these two tests. Moreover,
in order to improve comparability between groups, the main
comparisons between ASC and TD groups were conducted
on two age-matched samples obtained by selecting, for each
participant with ASC, the participant with TD who was
closer in age. In those cases in which two or more children
with TD were at the same minimum distance (in months)
from a given participant with ASC, all of them were
included. With this procedure, we ended up with two
comparable samples of 23 participants with TD (11 male)
and 17 participants with ASC. Table 1 shows that these two
samples were strictly comparable in terms of age and
cognitive abilities, but that there was a highly significant
difference between them in the AQ scores.
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J Autism Dev Disord Final version of the paper published on line at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0
Apparatus and Material
The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test was administered
individually. Raven SPM Test was administered in small
class groups for the participants with TD, and individually to
participants with ASC. The Autism-Spectrum Quotient
questionnaire was filled in by the parents. The Child version
was used for participants below 12 years old, and the
Adolescent version was administered for older participants.
In the imitation task, participants were instructed to watch a
series of actions performed by a model, and to ‘‘do as they
see’’, right after the demonstration finished. To minimize
the impact of social factors, the demonstrations were shown
as 5-s video-clips which showed the torso, arms, and hands,
but not the head, of an adult model, who was sitting in front
of a metal pen holder and of a wooden bar resting
horizontally on a pair of cradles. During the movie, the
model grasped the bar from the cradle and inserted it into
the metal pen holder. Analogous material was located in
front of the observers, in a mirror arrangement with respect
to the items shown in the movie. Participants were told that
they should do as they see in the movie, as soon as the video
ended and was replaced by a black screen displaying the
sentence: ‘‘Your Turn.’’ Imitation instructions remained
deliberately vague as to exactly ‘‘what’’ should be imitated,
in order to leave up to participants the final decision on what
to imitate.
The wooden bar was either a mono-color (white) or a
bicolor (black-and-white) dowel, 30 cm long 9 3 cm wide,
which rested on two cradles of 20 cm high, separated from
each other by a distance of 15 cm. These measures were
designed to allow participants to hold the bar comfortably,
using either an underhand or an overhand grip. The pen
holder was a metal cylindrical container, 17 cm height 9 7
cm wide, located at about 20 cm to the left of the cradles.
This material was mounted on a rotary ring, with a computer
screen standing on the middle of the ring. The experimenter
remained behind the monitor (see Fig. 1). After each trial,
the experimenter rotated the ring, removed the bar from the
container, and prepared the display for the next trial, while
the computer monitor remained stationary. Participants’
hand movements were continuously video-taped, and their
performance was encoded offline.
Design and Procedure
Participants completed 32 imitation trials, corresponding to
four random repetitions of eight different types of modeling
trials, which combined two modeled end-states
(comfortable, or thumb-up, and uncomfortable, or thumb-
down), two goals (inserting the closer or the farther side of
the bar in the container), and two values of goal-salience
(depending on whether the bar was mono-color or bicolor).
Thus, the overall design was a mixed 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 design
with Group (ASC vs. TD) as a between-participants factor,
and with Goal (2), Salience (2) and Modeled End-State (2)
as repeated measures. Participants were verbally reinforced
after every single trial regardless of their performance, and
the experimenter just asked them to remain with their hands
resting on the table until the clip had finished, and to start
moving their hands only after the appearance of the message
‘‘Your Turn.’’ A yellow column displayed on the right side
of the monitor was gradually filled in green to inform
participants about the number of completed and remaining
trials.
Fig. 1 Left panel Illustration of the experimental procedure,
showing a high-salience trial. Right panel Schematic
representation of the eight different types of trials (see the text
for details)
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J Autism Dev Disord Final version of the paper published on line at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0
Even though participants were not explicitly informed as to
what to imitate, the task goal was operationally defined as
that of inserting the same side of the bar as shown in the
video clip (i.e., either the extreme located closer or farther to
the container). In those trials displaying a bicolor bar, each
color was uniformly assigned to a side (i.e., the black side
was always located close to the container), and therefore the
goal became more salient, as it could be redefined as that of
inserting the same color of the bar as shown in the video-
clip. In contrast, the mono-color trials made more difficult
for participants to ascertain which side of the bar had been
inserted, and they arguably required participants to pay
attention to the specific movements made by the
demonstrator, as a way to distinguish which extreme was
actually inserted. In that condition, therefore, being able to
benefit from mimicry to automatically encode and reproduce
the observed movements could be especially helpful for
participants to reproduce the goal. Thus, if participants with
ASC had a specific difficulty with mimicry, we could expect
the difference between groups to become larger for these
less salient goals.
In addition to the manipulation of goal-salience, different
combinations of modeling grips and end-states were
arranged to (1) confirm the ESC effect, (2) assess the overall
level of goal imitation, and (3) distinguish between the
effects of mimicry and emulation on those trials in which
participants did accurately reproduce the goal. ESC planning
was assessed as the difference between the proportions of
trials in which the observers reproduced either comfortable
or uncomfortable end states. Overall goal imitation was
assessed by means of the proportion of trials in which the
observers were able to reproduce the goal. Finally, because
reproducing an action consistent with the ESC effect could
be driven by both imitation and action planning, the
emulation and mimicry components were specifically
assessed in those trials modeling uncomfortable end-states.
In those trials, emulation and mimicry were assumed to lead
to different results: whereas mimicry should increase the
probability of reaching the observed goals by reproducing
exactly the demonstrated actions, even when they resulted in
uncomfortable end states, emulation strategies—in
conjunction with the ESC effect—should be expected to
lead observers to disregard those inefficient demonstrations,
and to focus on achieving the same goal by means of the
most efficient action pattern. For instance, if participants
saw a model who inserted the closer side of the bar using an
overhand grip, and thus finishing the action in an awkward
thumb-down posture, emulators would be expected to
reproduce the same goal in a more efficient way, by
adopting the opposite action pattern.
Results
The ESC Effect
To explore whether the ESC effect arose in this imitative
version of the bar task in children with TD, and whether this
effect was modulated by gender or age group, a preliminary
analysis was conducted by comparing the proportion of
trials in which participants imitated the observed end state
depending on whether the model illustrated a comfortable
(thumb-up) or an uncomfortable (thumbdown) posture. The
mixed Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) conducted with
Gender and Age Group as grouping factors, and with
Modeled End State as a repeated measure, showed no effect
or interaction involving Gender. In contrast, there was a
significant effect of Age Group, indicating that participants
imitated the demonstrated end-states more frequently with
age (.84, .88, .97, .97), F(3, 89) = 10.21, p<.001, ηp2 = .26,
that they imitated comfortable end states more often than
non-comfortable end states (.95 vs. 87), F(1, 89) = 14.230,
p<.001, ηp2 = .14, and that this latter difference tended to
disappear with age, as attested by a significant interaction
between both factors, F(3, 89) = 5.67, p = .001, ηp2 = .16.
Thus, as observed in Fig. 2a, the end-state effect was clearly
observed in the youngest participants with TD, but it tended
to disappear with age, as they showed an increased tendency
to reproduce both comfortable and uncomfortable end states.
To compare the ESC effect observed in participants with
TD and ASC, we relied exclusively on the age-matched
samples of participants with TD (N = 23) and ASC (N = 17).
An ANOVA with Group and Modeled End State showed
significant effects of Group F(1, 38) = 4.47, p<.05, ηp2 =
.11, and of Modeled End State, F(1, 38) = 17.99, p<.001,
ηp2 = .32, as well as a significant interaction between them
F(1, 38) = 5.50, p<.05, ηp2 = .13. In short, the results
showed that both groups imitated comfortable end states
more often than noncomfortable end states (.95 vs. .81), and
that they imitated the comfortable postures to a similar
extent (.95 in both cases), but that participants with TD
imitated non-comfortable end states more frequently that did
participants with ASC (.89 vs. .72).
Overall Goal Imitation in Participants with TD and ASC
To assess the overall level of imitation of the goals in TD
and ASC groups, we also relied on the comparison between
the age-matched samples of participants with TD and ASC,
but we first conducted a preliminary analysis to confirm that
the factor of Gender was not affecting the proportion of
trials in which participants with TD were reproducing the
modeled goal. A mixed ANOVA conducted for this group,
with Gender as a between participants factor, and with Goal
Salience (mono-color vs. bicolor bar), and Modeled End
State (comfortable vs. uncomfortable) as repeated measures,
showed no effect or interaction involving Gender. Next, as
for the comparison between ASC and TD groups, the
corresponding ANOVA conducted with Goal Salience and
Modeled End State, but now with Group (ASC vs. TD) as a
between participants factor, showed a significant effect of
Goal Salience (.96 vs. .90), F(1, 38) = 18.25, p<.001, ηp2 =
.32, but not a significant effect of Modeled End State, F(1,
38) = 3.40, p<.08, nor an effect of Group, p[.20. However,
the two-way Group 9 Goal Salience interaction was exactly
on the limit of significance, F(1, 38) = 4.06, p = .05, ηp2 =
.10, thus suggesting that goal imitation was more similar
between groups in those trials displaying a bicolor bar (.96
vs. .96), than in those showing a mono-color bar (.93 vs.
86). Putting it differently, even though the effect of goal
salience was significant in both groups, the effect size was
larger for the ASC group, F(1, 16) = 14.07, p<.005; ηp2 =
.47, than for the TD group, F(1, 22) = 4.22, p = .052; ηp2 =
.16 (see Fig. 2b).
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J Autism Dev Disord Final version of the paper published on line at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0

Emulation and Mimicry on Trials not Complying with the

ESC Effect

Finally, to distinguish the effects of emulation and mimicry,

we focused specifically on those trials in which the model
illustrated an action ending in a non-comfortable state, and
analyzed the way in which participants with TD and ASC
achieved those goals. Thus, from all those trials in which the
observers fulfilled the action goal in conditions in which the
model illustrated a suboptimal action, a mimicry score was
computed as the proportion of trials in which the goal was
achieved by reproducing exactly the demonstrated pattern,
instead of recurring to the opposite, but more efficient,
pattern.
Again, the preliminary ANOVA conducted on these
scores for participants with TD, using Gender as a between-
participants factor, and Goal-Salience as a repeated measure,
showed no significant effect or interaction involving
Gender. Next, the ANOVA conducted on the mimicry
scores with Group as a between-participants factor, and with
Goal Salience as a repeated measure, showed only a
significant main effect of Group, F(1, 38) = 5.94, p<.02, η2
= .14, indicating that, for those trials, typical school students
showed a larger tendency to reach the goal by replicating
those patterns than did participants with ASC (.91 vs. .73).
The tendency to reproduce those patterns was numerically
larger when the goal was of low salience than when it was of
high salience (.84 vs. .80), but this difference was not
significant, and neither was significant the interaction
between Goal Salience and Group (F\1). In sum, the results
indicated that, when the model illustrated a suboptimal way
to achieve the goal, participants with TD tended to
systematically reproduce it, whereas participants with ASC
showed a lesser propensity to replicate those relatively
inefficient actions (see Fig. 2c).

Discussion

This study derives from Hamilton’s (2008) proposal on the

existence of two routes for imitation, and from her
suggestion that a deficit in the mimicry route could account
for the imitation pattern that is typically found in children
with autism, who often ‘‘succeed on tasks requiring
emulation of the goal of an action, but show abnormal
performance on those tasks requiring automatic mimicry’’
(p. 109). Taking advantage of the ESC effect (Rosenbaum et
al. 1990), which allowed us to model different actions
fulfilling the same goal with different degrees of efficiency,
we arranged a variant of the imitative bar task reported in
Hamilton et al. (2007, Experiment 3), in which we
manipulated the relative efficiency of the modeled actions
and the salience of the demonstrated goal. Because recent
experiments have shown that the ESC effect does gradually
develop with age (Weigelt and Schack 2010), we analyzed
this effect on a relatively large sample of participants with
typical development, and compared the performance of a
group of participants with high-functioning autism or
Asperger Syndrome with that of a closely age-matched
sample of participants with TD, who showed comparable
levels of cognitive abilities.
The results indicated that both participants with TD and
ASC showed the typical effects of action planning in this
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J Autism Dev Disord Final version of the paper published on line at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0
imitative version of the bar task, but that older participants
with TD tended to sacrifice efficiency in order to reproduce
exactly the demonstrated pattern. Results also indicated that
both groups imitated the observed goals to the same extent
when the goals were highly salient (i.e., when the task
required only to insert the same color of the bar as illustrated
in the video-clip). However, participants with ASC appeared
to have more difficulties than those with TD to reproduce
the goal in those trials displaying a monocolor bar, arguably
because in these conditions participants need to use the
actual movements performed by the model to ascertain
which extreme of the bar was actually inserted in the pen
holder. Finally, when emulation and mimicry were
specifically dissociated, in those trials in which the modeled
goal could be achieved more easily by adopting an action
pattern opposite to that illustrated by the model, the results
indicated that participants with TD showed a larger tendency
to sacrifice efficiency and to reproduce exactly the
illustrated action than did participants with ASC.
Action Planning in TD and ASC
The results provide evidence on the normal development of
action planning in participants with TD, as well as on the
planning abilities observed in a group of school children
with ASC. As for the normal development of action
planning, the results indicate that TD children as young as
7–9 years old are already sensitive to the ESC effect, as
attested by the difference between their tendencies to
reproduce those actions ending either in comfortable or in
uncomfortable states. This result is consistent with the claim
that such advanced planning processes are already
developed by this age (Thibaut and Toussaint 2010).
Moreover, the results also show that children with ASC
were similarly sensitive to the ESC effect as the age-
matched sample of participants with TD. This latter finding
is in agreement with the results reported by van Swieten et
al. (2010), who tested children and adolescents with ASC
and TD of comparable chronological ages, but it differs
from those obtained by Hughes (1996), who compared
individuals with ASC and TD matched in terms of their
mental age, but differing importantly in chronological age
(13 vs. 4 years old). The origin of this discrepancy is not
completely clear, but it points to the convenience of using
individuals with high functioning autism as the preferred
targets to conduct this kind of comparative study. Even
though analyzing imitation in other, non high-functioning,
individuals with autism will be obviously needed to obtain a
larger picture of the imitation profile observed over the
whole spectrum of autism, dissociating the impact of
imitation deficits from those caused by other cognitive
factors will surely be more easily attained by using samples
of participants with ASC and TD as comparable as possible
to each other in terms of both chronological and mental
ages.
Imitation and Goal Salience
Our results suggest that the manipulation of goal salience
arranged in this experiment has been useful to bring about
some differences between participants with TD and ASC
which were not found in Hamilton et al. (2007). We surmise
that their use of a bicolor bar, together with their modeling
of actions which invariably led to comfortable end states,
may have made their task particularly sensitive to goal-
driven strategies, hence minimizing the differences in
performance between both groups. In contrast, our version
of the task modeled different combinations of grips and end-
states, thus allowing us to distinguish between goal-oriented
and action-oriented imitation. Moreover, by including
conditions in which the two extremes of the bar were not
marked with a different color, we made the encoding of the
specific movements performed by the model particularly
useful for the observers to recognize which extreme of the
bar had been inserted in the container, and therefore more
helpful to reproduce low-salience goals. From this
conceptual standpoint, we hypothesized that, if participants
with ASC showed specific difficulties with mimicry, we
should obtain comparable performance between groups in
those conditions in which the goals were marked by salient
features of the objects (i.e., bar colors), but not so much in
those cases in which the encoding the modeled movements
could be instrumental to identify those goals. According to
the hypothesis, our results indicated that participants’
performance was affected by the salience of the goal in both
groups, but that the size of the effect was larger for
participants with ASC.
Interactions Between Planning, Mimicry, and Emulation
Constraints
In addition to showing that action planning effects were
already developed in the youngest participants with TD, our
results indicated that these planning effects interacted with
imitation constraints, so that older participants sacrificed
their tendencies to end their actions in comfortable end
states, and tended to reproduce all actions regardless of the
efficiency constraints. In the comparison between
agematched groups with ASC and TD, the overall tendency
to imitate comfortable end states did not differ between
groups, but the mimicry scores indicated that, in those cases
in which the observers reproduced a goal which had been
modeled by means of a suboptimal action pattern,
participants with TD tended to reproduce those relatively
inefficient patterns in almost every trial, whereas
participants with ASC showed a lower tendency to adopt
such inefficient actions, and therefore an increased tendency
to yield the goal by adopting the opposite, but more
efficient, action.
In general, these results may be taken as consistent with
Hamilton’s dual-route model of imitation, and in particular
with the claim that individuals with ASC are less prone to
mimic the observed action patterns, and show a larger
tendency to imitate the goals rather than the exact
movements performed by a model. However, before
endorsing that conclusion, one may need to discuss whether
the tendency observed in participants with TD to reproduce
the suboptimal actions may obey either to mimicry—
understood as a spontaneous tendency to reproduce any
observed action, regardless of its goals—or to an explicit
decision to set their goal as that of reproducing all the
movements performed by the models, regardless of their
material outcome.
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J Autism Dev Disord Final version of the paper published on line at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0
From the present results, it is not possible to distinguish
empirically between these two alternatives, because our
procedure deliberately aimed at leaving up to the
participants the final decision on what to imitate. Thus, it is
possible that the difference observed between both groups
may stem from the fact that participants with autism were
more focused on the material outcome, whereas participants
with TD were more inclined to interpret that they should
reproduce the full observed movements. This question might
have been better assessed by removing the ambiguity, and
by asking participants explicitly to reproduce the same
material outcome—i.e., to insert the same side of the bar in
the container as shown in the video-clip. These conditions
would have made the demonstrated actions explicitly
irrelevant for the observers’ goal, and therefore they would
have made the task more strictly comparable to those used in
the standard automatic imitation paradigm (Heyes 2011). In
these conditions, if participants were still affected by the
demonstrated actions, one could safely conclude that
imitation effects were independent from the observers’
goals. However, because in the present conditions we have
found a strong default tendency to act in agreement with the
ESC effect, and because asking participants to focus on the
orientation of the bar could surely have the effect of
directing their attention away from the moving hand, we
surmised that it would be unlikely that a non-attended
demonstration could affect participants’ default tendencies.
Thus, instead of adapting this paradigm to make it more
comparable to those of automatic imitation, we decided to
test automatic imitation in parallel, presenting the same
participants with another task analogous to that used by
Jiménez et al. (2012). In this parallel study ( Jiménez et al.
submitted), we obtained converging evidence showing that
automatic imitation effects were clearly demonstrated in
participants with TD, whereas the ASC group showed a
pattern of performance more consistent with an effect of
orthogonal spatial correspondence (Proctor and Cho 2003).
Taken together, the results of both studies could be more
parsimoniously explained in terms of a single difficulty with
mimicry, rather than in terms of the conjunction of a
difficulty with mimicry, plus a difference in the
interpretation of the imitation goals.
Overimitation
The imitation paradigm tested in this study has been used to
test mimicry, which is more often assessed through a variety
of paradigms of automatic imitation. However, the present
procedure has much in common with the studies of
overimitation, in which participants are explicitly asked to
imitate a model, but in which the experimenters also include
certain actions which are obviously non functional, in an
attempt to assess whether the imitation profile includes only
the instrumental components of the action, or is extended
also to its less functional parts (Hobson and Lee 1999;
Hobson and Meyer 2006; Nielsen et al. 2013; Rogers et al.
2010). In these tasks, Rogers et al. reported that children
with autism tended to copy fewer of the nonfunctional
components of the observed actions, thus suggesting,
consistently with the present results, that people with ASC
are more focused on reproducing the goal, rather than on
replicating the full modeled actions. However, in contrast to
this result, Nielsen et al. (2013) reported comparable levels
of overimitation between a group of typically developing
children and a group of participants with high functioning
autism. They attributed the discrepancy between their own
results and those previously reported in the literature to the
fact that they ‘‘assessed children with autism who were
cognitively able.’’ However, our results could be taken as
evidence opposite to this argument, since they show that a
deficit in overimitation could be observed by comparing two
groups of children with ASC and TD matched in both
chronological and cognitive age.
We contend that the main difference between these two
studies relies on the subtlety of the manipulations or, more
precisely, on the degree in which the goal to imitate the
details of the action was ostensibly conveyed by the
pragmatics of the action. Indeed, in the study by Nielsen et
al. (2013), the models did never demonstrate the most
functional way to do the task, and they repeated the same
non-functional action several times before passing the object
along to the observer. Moreover, these non-functional
actions consisted of repetitive and almost ritualistic patterns,
which made fairly explicit for the observers that their task
was not just to obtain an outcome, but rather to specifically
reproduce the whole action pattern. In contrast, our study
was designed to keep the goal more ambiguous, and to use
much more plausible candidates as the nonoptimal action
patterns, including components (e.g., grips) which were part
of the optimal actions performed on some other trials. In this
way, our procedure aimed at making room for the
expression of imitative factors which were not necessarily
driven by the observers’ definition of the imitation goal, but
which might have been caused by more indirect factors,
such as the automatic impact of observing a particular
gesture on the observers’ action choice. As pointed out by
Marsh et al. (2013), overimitation can be caused by
processes such as the social motivation to conform to the
perceived norms, but also by a number of other processes,
including object learning or priming from the observed
action patterns. Marsh et al. reported that, when the
instructions emphasized efficiency, participants with TD
still showed a tendency to imitate the non-functional actions
performed by the models, whereas participants with ASC
were less affected by those actions. These results are fully
consistent with the pattern obtained in the present study,
which showed that, when the observed action patterns were
suboptimal, but still somewhat plausible, participants with
TD showed a stronger tendency to replicate those patterns
than did participants with ASC.
In sum, this study has shown that participants with ASC
are similarly sensitive to action planning constraints as are
their typically developing counterparts, but that they may
show specific difficulties to imitate action goals when they
become less salient, and when the identification of these
goals depends on an encoding of the specific movements
performed by the demonstrator. The results also showed that
typically developing school students tended to sacrifice
action planning constraints in favor of imitating both the
functional and the less functional features of an observed
action, but that this tendency to imitate unnecessary actions
was reduced in participants with ASC. The major limitations
of this study, which will need to be addressed in further
research, have to do with the relatively low number of
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J Autism Dev Disord Final version of the paper published on line at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-2027-0
participants with ASC, which did not allow us to explore the
existence of a developmental trend in how they imitate in
these conditions, as we did with the larger group of
participants with TD. In addition, we were not able to give a
definitive response to the question of whether the observed
differences between these two groups depended either on the
impact of mimicry, or rather on the participants’ construal of
the task requirements. Just as it happens in most paradigms
of overimitation, the observers’ selection of suboptimal
ways to do the task might be attributed to a host of different
factors, including perceptual-motor priming—or automatic
imitation—but also effects related to the social interpretation
of the task requirements. The use of relatively plausible
action patterns was intended to control for some of these
social factors, and therefore to make more room for the
expression of mimetic effects. However, more research will
be needed to distinguish more clearly between these two
components.
Acknowledgments This research was financially supported by the
Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacio´n and by the Xunta de
Galicia with research grants to Luis Jiménez(PSI2009-10823 and
INCITE09211132PR). The authors wish to thank children, parents and
teachers from CEIP Rain˜a Fabiola and IES Rosalı´a de Castro, as well
as from ASPERGA and BATA Associations, for their collaboration in
this research. We thank Beatriz Permuy, Sergio Recio, for their
assistance in data collection.
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