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Exploring the Neural Architecture of Cultural Imitative Learning

Abstract

Imitation is a key mechanism by which people learn from others and is a fundamental component of cultural acquisition. Importantly, people do not imitate everyone in their social environment to the same degree. Instead, people preferentially imitate certain individuals including those who are similar to them or have high social status. These imitative biases are thought to automatically direct attention to individuals most likely to exhibit self-relevant or high quality behaviors, thus increasing the efficiency of cultural learning. Though much is known about the neural mechanisms underlying imitation, the neural mechanisms underlying imitative biases are largely unknown. In this dissertation, I began to address this knowledge gap by using fMRI to measure neural activity while people imitated individuals differing in self-similarity and social status. I focus on gender and race, two factors that can index a person's self-similarity and social status and that are known to influence the likelihood of imitation.

In chapter 1, I proposed a tentative model of the neural mechanisms underlying imitative cultural learning. In chapter 2, I tested this model in relation to gender imitative biases. I found that the brain's reward system was more active during imitation of own-gender compared to other-gender models, suggesting a neural mechanism underlying the preferential imitation of own-gender models. In chapters 3 and 4, I tested this model in terms of imitative biases related to race. I found that both European Americans and African Americans exhibited more activity in visual regions and lateral fronto-parietal regions when imitating African American models compared to either European American or Chinese American models. Regardless of their own race, participants also rated African Americans as having lower social status than either European or Chinese Americans, suggesting that social status rather than self-similarity drives neural responses to race during imitation.

Taken together, these studies demonstrate that the neural systems that support imitation are modulated by the gender and race of the person being imitated. These data also suggest that both self-similarity and social status influence neural responses to race during imitation, highlighting neural mechanisms that may underlie similarity and status biases in cultural imitative learning.

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