Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Introduction : the constructive interdisciplinary viewpoint for understanding mechanisms and models of imitation and social learning / Chrystopher L. Nehaniv and Kerstin Dautenhahn -- Correspondence problem and mechanisms -- Imitation : thoughts about theories / Geoffrey Bird and Cecilia Heyes -- Nine billion correspondence problems / Chrystopher L. Nehaniv -- Challenges and issues faced in building a framework for conducting research in learning from observation / Darrin Bentivegna, Christopher Akteson and Gordon Cheng -- Mirroring and 'mind-reading' -- A neural architecture for imitation and intentional relations / Marco Iacoboni, Jonas Kaplan, and Stephen Wilson -- Simulation theory of understanding others : a robotics perspective / Yiannis Demiris and Matthew Johnson -- Mirrors and matchings : imitation from the perspective of mirror-self-recognition, and the parietal region's involvement in both / Robert W. Mitchell -- What to imitate -- The question of 'what to imitate' : inferring goals and intentions from demonstrations / Malinda Carpenter and Josep Call -- Learning of gestures by imitation in a humanoid robot / Sylvain Calinon and Aude Billard -- The dynamic emergence of categories through imitation / Tony Belpaeme, Bart de Boer and Bart Jansen -- Development and embodiment -- Copying strategies by people with autistic spectrum disorder : why only imitation leads to social cognitive development / Justin H. G. Williams -- A bayesian model of imitation in infants and robots / Rajesh P. N. Rao, Aaron P. Shon, and Andrew N. Meltzoff -- Solving the correspondence problem in robotic imitation across embodiments : synchrony, perception and culture in artifacts / Aris Alissandrakis, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, and Kerstin Dautenhahn -- Synchrony and turn-taking as communicative mechanisms -- How to build an imitator? / Arnaud Revel and Jacqueline Nadel -- Simulated turn-taking and development of styles of motion / Takashi Ikegami and Hiroki Iizuka -- Bullying behaviour, empathy and imitation : an attempted synthesis / Kerstin Dautenhahn, Sarah N. Woods, and Christina Kaouri -- Why imitate? -- motivations -- Multiple motivations for imitation in infancy / Mark Nielsen and Virginia Slaughter -- The progress drive hypothesis : an interpretation of early imitation / Frederic Kaplan and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer -- Social feedback -- Training behavior by imitation : from parrots to people ... to robots? / Irene M. Pepperberg and Diane V. Sherman -- Task learning through imitation and human-robot interaction / Monica N. Nicolescu and Maja J. Mataric -- The ecological context -- Emulation learning : the integration of technical and social cognition / Ludwig Huber -- Mimicry as deceptive resemblance : beyond the one-trick ponies / Mark D. Norman and Tom Tregenza.

Mechanisms of imitation and social matching play a fundamental role in development, communication, interaction, learning and culture. Their investigation in different agents (animals, humans and robots) has significantly influenced our understanding of the nature and origins of social intelligence. Whilst such issues have traditionally been studied in areas such as psychology, biology and ethnology, it has become increasingly recognised that a 'constructive approach' towards imitation and social learning via the synthesis of artificial agents can provide important insights into mechanisms and create artefacts that can be instructed and taught by imitation, demonstration, and social interaction rather than by explicit programming. This book studies increasingly sophisticated models and mechanisms of social matching behaviour and marks an important step towards the development of an interdisciplinary research field, consolidating and providing a valuable reference for the increasing number of researchers in the field of imitation and social learning in robots, humans and animals.