Empirical studies on origins of behavioral contagion and imitation by human and monkeys.

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Although imitation is effective when one acquire new skills or behaviors, imitation is limited almost only to humans. In contrast, contagious yawing is observed in many primates. It was unclear non-human primates do not posses ability of imitation. To study evolutional and physiological foundations of "automatic behavior copy", we investigate behavior contagions by Japanese monkeys and brain mechanisms of contagious behaviors by humans. Monkeys that trained to vocalize to the visual cue also vocalize to the auditory cues (long coo call, short coo call, and white noise), however their vocalizations did not correspond to each of auditory cues. Thus, the monkeys did not show behavior contagion to their conspecific calls. Human adults were elicited yawing to yawing videos more frequently than to mouth-opening videos. EEG analyses revealed that two distinct information processing were evident in different brain regions: cognitive imitation and emotional imitation.