Introduction to Automatic Imitation

People automatically imitate a variety of different behaviors. Interest in research on this phenomenon dates back to at least the eighteenth century. However, systematic studies into automatic imitation did not gain momentum until the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, researchers from various fields of psychology and neuroscience started investigating the underlying processes and consequences of automatic imitation. This book provides a comprehensive examination of the widespread occurrence of automatic imitation, exploring both what and how individuals imitate, offering a critical analysis of the research conducted over the past 25 years. In this introduction, we give a brief overview of each of the chapters captured in this book.