Imitative learning of actions on objects by children, chimpanzees, and enculturated chimpanzees.

By Michael Tomasello, S. Savage-Rumbaugh, A. Kruger. 1993

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Visual Imitation Made Easy (2020, background): “A powerful technique to learn complex robotic skills is to imitate them from humans [1, 2, 3, 4].”
Push or Pull: Imitation vs. Emulation in Great Apes and Human Children (2006, background): “Moreover, some enculturated apes seem more attuned to actions than results (Tomasello et al. 1993; Bjorklund et al. 2002).”
Computational approaches to motor learning by imitation. (2003, unknown): “In addition to a variety of social, cultural and cognitive implications that the ability to imitate entails (cf. reviews in Piaget 1951; Tomasello et al. 1993; Meltzoff & Moore 1994; Byrne & Russon 1998; Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998; Dautenhahn & Nehaniv 2002), from the viewpoint of learning, a teacher’s”
Human Culture in Evolutionary Perspective (2010, background): “…( 1995 ) were able to train individuals over a several-month period to reproduce some demonstrated actions in the so-called do-as-I-do paradigm, and Tomasello, Savage-Rumbaugh, and Kruger ( 1993 ) found that enculturated apes were better at following demonstrations of actions on objects than were…”