ArticlePDF Available

Imitation and the Definition of a Meme

Authors:

Abstract

The dictionary definition, and Dawkins's (1976) original conception of the meme, both include the idea that memes are copied from one person to another by imitation. We therefore need to be clear what is meant by imitation. Imitation is distinguished from contagion, individual learning and various kinds of non-imitative social learning such as stimulus enhancement, local enhancement and goal emulation. True imitation is extremely rare in animals other than humans, except for birdsong and dolphin vocalisation, suggesting that they can have few or no memes. I argue that more complex human cognitive processes, such as language, reading, scientific research and so on, all build in some way on the ability to imitate, and therefore all these processes are, or can be, memetic. When we are clear about the nature of imitation, it is obvious what does and does not count as a meme. I suggest that we stick to defining the meme as that which is passed on by imitation.
Imitation and the definition of a meme
Revised paper for Journal of Memetics October 1998
Susan Blackmore
University of the West of England
St Matthias College
Bristol BS16 2JP
Abstract
The dictionary definition, and Dawkins’s (1976) original conception of the meme, both
include the idea that memes are copied from one person to another by imitation. We
therefore need to be clear what is meant by imitation. Imitation is distinguished from
contagion, individual learning and various kinds of non-imitative social learning such as
stimulus enhancement, local enhancement and goal emulation. True imitation is extremely
rare in animals other than humans, except for birdsong and dolphin vocalisation, suggesting
that they can have few or no memes. I argue that more complex human cognitive processes,
such as language, reading, scientific research and so on, all build in some way on the ability
to imitate, and therefore all these processes are, or can be, memetic. When we are clear
about the nature of imitation, it is obvious what does and does not count as a meme. I
suggest that we stick to defining the meme as that which is passed on by imitation.
1. Introduction
There are many ways of defining the meme but there are two that we should perhaps
take particularly seriously. First, Dawkins, who coined the term meme, described memes as
units of cultural transmission which “propagate themselves in the meme pool by ... a process
which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Dawkins, 1976 p 192). Second, the
Oxford English Dictionary defines a meme as follows: “meme (mi:m), n. Biol. (shortened
from mimeme ... that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be
considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”. Both these definitions
include the critical point that memes are cultural information that is copied, and that it is
copied by imitation. The OED is arguably the most important dictionary of the English
language and is, as far as I know, the first to include the word ‘meme’. It would be
unfortunate if memeticists began to use definitions of the meme that were incompatible with
the dictionary definition, unless there were good reasons for doing so.
Some technical definitions are quite unlike the dictionary one, but are nonetheless
perfectly compatible with it. A good example is Wilkins’s (1998): “A meme is the least unit of
sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable
selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change.” This is useful because it
emphasises, first, that the size of the relevant unit is not fixed but can vary in different
contexts and, second, the importance of fidelity (i.e. the stability or resistance to change of
the information). In this way Wilkins’s definition of the meme is similar to Williams’s (1966)
definition of the gene. This definition may be useful for theoretical purposes but is too
complicated for more general use, or for popular treatments of memetics. However this is not
a problem since Wilkins’s definition does not conflict with the OED definition.
Some other definitions clearly are incompatible with the OED. Some, for example,
imply that almost everything we know or experience can count as a meme, whether acquired
by imitation or not (e.g. Brodie, 1996; Gabora, 1997; Lynch, 1996). Brodie includes operant
conditioning, and indeed all conditioning, as memetic. Gabora goes even further and
includes ideas, perceptions, emotions, attitudes, and indeed “anything that can be the
subject of an instant of experience”. According to this broadest definition a garden frog
would have a mass of memes (even though it is totally incapable of imitation or any kind of
culture) because it has perceptions and emotions, and is capable of many kinds of learning.
I shall argue that these broader definitions are deeply confusing. They take away the
idea of the meme as a replicator (which was the original reason for its invention, and
provides its context within evolutionary theory), ignore the idea that memes must be passed
on by some kind of copying, and merely add confusion to the already difficult problem of
understanding consciousness. I suggest we are better to stick to the original definition of the
meme as transmitted by imitation.
1.1 Defining Imitation
What is imitation? In this paper I want to tackle the question from two directions. First
I will consider simpler kinds of learning and cognitive processes which may, or may not, be
counted as imitation. Second I will consider whether imitation includes all higher-order
human cognitive processes, such as speech, reading, teaching and instruction, upon which
much of our cultural life depends. I will argue that when we have clarified these issues we
will no longer have serious problems in defining the meme.
There is a long history of research on imitation in both animal behaviour and human
social psychology (for review see Whiten and Ham, 1992). In the nineteenth century Darwin
collected many examples of what he took to be imitation in animals, as did Romanes (1882,
1883) but they did not define what they meant by imitation. Baldwin (1902) gave imitation a
central role in his theories of evolution, pointing out that all adaptive processes can be seen
as imitative - perhaps foreshadowing the universal Darwinism that today enables
comparisons between biological evolution and memetic evolution (e.g. Dawkins, 1976;
Plotkin, 1993). The psychologist, Thorndike (1898), was possibly the first to provide a clear
definition of imitation as “learning to do an act from seeing it done”.
Thorndike’s definition (though confined to visual information) captures the essential
idea that in imitation a new behaviour is learned by copying it from someone else. One
hundred years later we can see the importance of this point in distinguishing imitation from
simple contagion and from other kinds of learning. These other kinds of learning can be
divided roughly into individual learning and non-imitative social learning.
2. Contagion
The term “contagion” is often associated with memetics. We may say that certain
memes are contagious, or more contagious than others. We may treat the spread of memes
as comparable with the spread of infectious or contagious diseases and use models derived
from epidemiology (Lynch, 1996). The term social contagion is often used to include
phenomena that are certainly memetic, such as the spread of fads, hysterical reactions
(Showalter, 1997), or even suicide (Marsden, 1997). However, the term is used in confusing
ways (Levy & Nail, 1993) and there is one kind of contagion that we must clearly distinguish
from imitation.
This is what has variously been called instinctive imitation, imitative suggestion,
social facilitation, coaction, and (simply) contagion (Whiten & Ham, 1992). Examples in
humans include the spread of yawning, coughing or laughter. All these behaviours are
extremely contagious. Indeed it can be difficult not to laugh if everyone around you is already
laughing. This kind of contagion probably relies on specific stimulus feature detectors which
detect laughing or yawning in someone else and then trigger the same innate behaviour as
the response. In other animals there are many examples of contagious vocalisations, such
as alarm calls. Most vertebrates yawn and some animals, such as chimpanzees, laugh in
response to tickling and play, but contagious laughter appears to be limited to humans
(Provine, 1996).
This kind of contagion is not true imitation. We can see why by considering
Thorndike’s simple definition. Yawning, coughing and laughing are innate behaviours. When
we start laughing because everyone else is laughing we have not learned how to do an act.
We already knew how to laugh, and the kind of laugh we make is not modelled on the laugh
we hear. So this kind of contagion is not imitation and should not be counted as memetic.
3. Individual Learning
In individual learning a person or animal learns something by itself, without anyone
else necessarily being involved. There are traditionally two major types of learning in
psychology - classical conditioning and operant conditioning.
3.1 Classical conditioning
Classical conditioning is when two stimuli become associated by repeated pairing. In
the best known experiments Pavlov paired sounds with the smell of meat and found that
dogs then salivated to the sounds even without any meat. Classical conditioning is
widespread in the animal kingdom, for example when animals learn to distinguish palatable
foods from poisonous foods, or learn other important facts about their environment. It occurs
in humans whenever we associate two things together because they have previously been
paired, whether those things are sights, sounds, tunes, ideas or pain. Behaviour is changed
by the process but nothing is passed on by imitation from one person to another, so the
process is not memetic.
You may say that Pavlov, in setting up the experiments in the first place, was passing
on something to his dogs. However, the dogs were not imitating him. There is no replication
or copying of behaviour from Pavlov to his dogs. Similarly if you have a dog or cat, it
probably starts salivating at the sound of the fridge opening or the knife hitting the food dish.
Or maybe it gets frightened at the sight of a new flea collar. This is classical conditioning at
work. You have certainly trained the animals by the contingencies you set up, but there is no
imitation involved.
3.2 Operant conditioning
Operant conditioning is when a behaviour made by an animal is either rewarded or
punished and therefore either increases or decreases in frequency. A hundred years ago
Thorndike studied this kind of trial and error learning in cats trying to escape from specially
designed boxes. In the 1930s Skinner famously provided animals with levers which, when
pressed, caused food to be delivered. Rats, pigeons and other animals quickly learn to press
the levers and their subsequent behaviour depends on the schedules of reinforcement used.
Skinner (1953) pointed out the similarity between operant conditioning and natural
selection - some behaviours are positively selected and others weeded out. In this way
learning can be seen as an evolutionary system in which the behaviours are the replicators.
Several selection theories of learning and of brain development have since been proposed
(e.g. Calvin, 1987; Edelmann, 1989; Plotkin, 1993), and are important for understanding the
breadth of application of Darwinian processes. However, as long as the behaviours cannot
be passed on to someone else by imitation then they do not count as memes and the
selection is not memetic selection.
Much of human learning is Skinnerian and not memetic. Whether consciously or not,
parents shape their children’s behaviour by the way they reinforce them. The most effective
reward for children is attention and rewards work better than punishment. So if parents pay
lots of attention to their children when they are behaving well, and act uninterested when
they scream or have tantrums, then behaving well is in the best interests of the children and
they will do it. The parents’ behaviour can be seen as part of the environment in which the
children learn, or as part of a complex pattern of social learning (discussed below). Either
way if the children are not imitating the parents then the process is not memetic.
We learn many things by trial and error, such as the physical skills of walking without
falling over or riding a bike, or general ways of interacting with other people and the world.
For example, people who are generally rewarded for hard work and persistence will behave
differently from people whose efforts are met with arbitrary results. Of course memes may be
involved - such as the very idea of riding a bike in the first place - but whenever we repeat
actions that led to successful outcomes and suppress actions that led to pain or failure, then
we are learning for ourselves by operant conditioning. We are not acquiring new memes.
3.3 Non-memetic learning
There are other kinds of learning that are also not memetic such as the formation of
cognitive maps. Many animals develop complex mental maps of their environment without
which they could not live at all, whether they are cats, rats, insects or birds. Some have
complex territorial systems in which boundaries are carefully guarded, some (like squirrels
for example) hide large numbers of food items are able accurately to find them again, while
others use well known paths to explore and find food. The information in the maps is learned
by exploration and conditioning. There is no imitation involved. Similarly we develop complex
cognitive maps of our own house and garden, the city we live in, and the places we go for
our holidays. We can find our way around these places and conjure them up in our
imagination. All this is individual learning and not memetic.
In practice we may not always be able to tease out those things we have individually
learned by conditioning from those we have learned by imitation, and very often both are
involved - but in principle the two are different. We know lots of things that are not memes.
4. Social Learning
Social learning means learning something from other people, (or, more generally,
from conspecifics). Very often classical and operant conditioning are the basic processes
involved, but something is learned in a way that involves other people or animals.
Social learning includes true imitation, but there are other kinds of social learning as
well. According to Heyes (1993) the difference is best explained like this. Imitation means
learning something about the form of behaviour through observing others, while other kinds
of social learning are learning about the environment through observing others. I like to think
of the difference in terms of copying. In true imitation something about the action is copied
from actor to imitator, while in other forms of social learning nothing is copied. This is
important because evolutionary processes depend on there being something that is copied
or replicated. Note that this fits well with Thorndike’s definition of imitation as “learning to do
an act from seeing it done”. If memes depend on imitation for their transmission then we
need to be clear about how to distinguish true imitation, which involves learning by copying a
new form of behaviour, from other kinds of social learning which do not.
4.1 Stimulus enhancement, local enhancement, and goal emulation
In 1921, in the south of England, some small garden birds called tits were seen
prising open the wax-board tops of milk bottles left on the doorstep. The habit later became
widespread across England and some parts of Scotland and Wales, with other species of
bird joining in, and foil tops being pecked as well. It seemed that the tits learned from each
other because this new behaviour spread gradually from village to village, and across
different areas, although it was obviously independently reinvented many times (Fisher &
Hinde, 1949). The spread of milk-bottle pecking was a simple cultural phenomenon but
purists would argue that it was based not on imitation, but on social learning (Sherry and
Galef, 1984). Imagine that one bird learned, by trial and error, that there was cream under
the bottle top. Then imagine another bird came by and saw the pecking and the obviously
pecked top. Pecking is a natural action for tits and their attention can easily be drawn to
something like a pecked top by the actions of other birds. So now the second bird is more
likely to land on the bottle and peck too. Reinforcement from the cream now means that this
bird is likely to repeat the action. It may then be seen by other birds. So this learning involves
operant conditioning (the effect of the cream), is a kind of social learning (because another
bird is involved), but is not true imitation (because the pecking is not actually copied). The
fact that the birds used lots of different methods for opening the bottles also suggests they
did not learn by direct imitation.
This kind of social learning is sometimes called “stimulus enhancement” - the
stimulus, in this case the bottle top, has become more readily noticed by the birds. Another
form of social learning that is not imitation is called “local enhancement”. This is when
attention is directed towards a specific place. For example, animals learn from each other
which objects or places to fear or ignore. Birds and rabbits learn not to fear trains by
following others who are not afraid and therefore become used to the frightening noise.
Rabbits can therefore establish warrens on railway embankments even though a naive rabbit
from somewhere else would run in terror from the sound of a train. Yet another kind of social
learning has been called “goal emulation”, when one animal copies the goals or outcomes of
another animal’s behaviour but without copying the form of that behaviour itself. An example
might be when an ape sees another ape getting food from a container and then uses a
different method of its own invention for getting at that food. We can now see that none of
these processes is true imitation because no new behaviours are copied from one animal to
another (for reviews of social learning and imitation see Heyes and Galef, 1996; Whiten and
Ham, 1992; Zentall and Galef, 1988). The behaviour of one animal comes to be similar to
that of another animal, but not by copying it.
Other famous examples that look like true cultural learning based on imitation include
the troop of Japanese macaques that learned to wash sweet-potatoes, and chimpanzees
that learned how to fish for termites by poking sticks into the mounds. However, both of
these appear to depend on individual learning and the kinds of social learning described
above, not on true imitation (Galef, 1992). So if you want to stick to the definition of memes
as transmitted by imitation then you have to say that bottle-top pecking, termite-fishing and
potato-washing are probably not memes.
5 True Imitation
The comparison with other forms of social learning raises the question whether true
imitation occurs at all in non-human animals.
5.1 Vocal imitation in birds and dolphins
There is no doubt that there are examples of vocal imitation in birds and cetaceans.
Song birds have been treated as a special case since research on imitation first began a
hundred years ago (Bonner, 1980; Delius, 1989; Thorndike, 1898; Whiten and Ham, 1992).
This is partly because imitation in birds is generally confined to sounds, and to rather specific
kinds of sound at that (with the possible exception of parrots who may be able to imitate
simple gestures). Many songbirds have long traditions. The young learn what to sing by
imitating their parents or neighbours. In chaffinches, for example, the nestling may hear its
father sing long before it is capable of singing itself. A few months later it begins to make a
wide variety of sounds, gradually narrowing down to the song it heard as a chick.
Experiments show that there is a critical period for learning and that the bird has to hear its
own song and match it to the remembered song it is imitating. Hand-raised birds can learn
songs from tape recorders and adopted birds sing songs more like their adopted, not
biological, parents. Some species learn many songs from neighbours and a few, like parrots
and mynahs, can imitate human speech.
Dolphins can also copy vocalisations, and young dolphins produce a wide variety of
sounds which they later cut down. Captive bottlenose dolphins have been shown to easily
imitate artificial signals relating to specific objects and use these new signals in spontaneous
play (McCowan & Reiss, 1997). So we can count dolphin whistles and bird songs as memes,
and indeed the cultural evolution of chaffinch song has been studied in terms of the
mutation, flow and drift of song memes (Lynch, Plunkett, Baker and Jenkins, 1989). These
very specific kinds of imitation are therefore unlike the examples of social learning we were
considering before.
5.2 Imitation in humans and other animals
As for other species, the picture is unclear. There have been claims of imitation
(other than vocalisation) in parrots, budgerigars, pigeons and rats, though all the claims have
also been disputed (see Heyes & Galef, 1996). Dolphins can apparently mimic familiar
behaviours but have not so far been shown to copy novel behaviours (Bauer & Johnson,
1994).Chimpanzees and gorillas that have been brought up in human families occasionally
imitate in ways that their wild counterparts do not (Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner, 1993).
However, when apes and human children are given the same problems, only the children
readily use imitation to solve them (Call and Tomasello, 1995).
Humans, therefore, seem to differ considerably from all other species. They are “the
consummate imitative generalist” (Meltzoff, 1988, p 59). Human infants are able to imitate a
wide range of vocal sounds, body postures, actions on objects, and even completely
arbitrary actions like bending down to touch your head on a plastic panel. By 14 months of
age they can even delay imitation for a week or more (Meltzoff, 1988), and they seem to
know when they are being imitated by adults (Meltzoff, 1996). Unlike any other animals we
readily imitate almost everything and anything.
If we define memes as transmitted by imitation then we must conclude that only
humans are capable of extensive memetic transmission. Some other theorists have included
all forms of social learning in their definitions of cultural evolution (e.g. Boyd and Richerson,
1985; Delius, 1989; Plotkin, 1996) and their mathematical models may usefully apply to all.
However, I suggest that it will be better for memetics to stick to the original definition of
memes.
5.3 Only imitation sustains a true evolutionary process.
One might argue that both social learning and imitation allow information about
behaviour to be transmitted and that the difference is only one of fidelity, longevity or
fecundity. Indeed Heyes (1994) does just this, arguing that the difference lies primarily in
longevity. However, I suggest that the other forms of social learning do not support a
replication system with true heredity.
Although new behaviours can be passed on by other kinds of social learning, the
process is cumbersome. For example, one animal must invent a new behaviour during
individual learning and then somehow lead a second animal into such a situation that it is
likely to learn the same new behaviour - or perhaps the first can behave in such a way as to
change the contingencies of learning for the second animal so that it learns the same (or a
similar) new behaviour. Most importantly, in these cases, the behaviour must be created
anew each time by the learner. The social situation, and the behaviour of the other animal
plays a role, but the details of the first behaviour are not transmitted and therefore cannot be
built upon and refined by further selective copying. In this sense, then, there is no true
heredity. This means there is no new replicator, no true evolution, and therefore the process
should not be considered as memetic.
By contrast, the skill of generalised imitation means that humans can invent new
behaviours of almost unlimited kinds and pass them on to each other by a kind of copying. If
we define memes as transmitted by imitation then whatever is passed on by this copying
process is a meme. Memes fulfil the role of replicator because they exhibit all three of the
necessary conditions; that is, heredity (the form and details of the behaviour are copied),
variation (they are copied with errors, embellishments or other variations), and selection
(only some behaviours are successfully copied). This is a true evolutionary process.
6. Human Cultural Learning
We learn about our culture in many ways, including reading and writing, watching
television, being deliberately taught by parents and school teachers, and by listening to the
conversations of others. In any consideration of memetics, from its origins in Dawkins’s
work, right through to the present, we count as memes all of the cultural behaviours passed
on in these various ways, including everything from fashions and habits, to political
ideologies and scientific theories. We would be daft to redefine the meme is such a way that
any of these was excluded, but this naturally raises the question of whether all these forms
of learning can really be counted as imitation.
There have been many attempts to classify the kinds of learning that underlie human
cultural transmission. For example Tomasello et al (1993) describe three forms of cultural
learning; imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning. They argue that
all these involve some kind of inter-subjectivity or perspective taking, with increasingly
complex kinds of social-cognitive concepts and processes involved. However, some prefer
not to speculate at all about the intentionality or hidden cognitive processes involved in
cultural learning (Zentall, 1996) while others take up the substantial questions of just what
kinds of perspective-taking, intentionality, mind-reading, or other complex cognitive
processes are involved in just which kinds of learning and teaching (see the extensive
commentaries following Tomasello et al, 1993). There is clearly no consensus here yet, and
it will not help us with defining the meme to launch into these tricky issues, even though in
the future of memetics these issues may be very important.
Heyes (1994) takes an entirely different route and argues that human cultural
learning is different from animals’ because it involves instruction and not imitation. However,
this distinction will not work, partly because animals do on occasion use instruction without
imitation (as in the examples of manipulating contingencies described above) and partly
because human instruction often entails imitation (as in learning to write or cook). Heyes
further argues that the creation of language and artefacts decouples cultural accumulation
from the process of imitation, but this means denying an important role to imitation in either
language or the creation of books, art, buildings and ideologies.
We may take a simpler position - that all these kinds of learning and teaching require
at least the ability to imitate. Language learning is a good example. Although there are many
arguments about just how much of language depends on having an innate grammar module
(Pinker, 1994), there is no doubt that human language learning involves the imitation of
sounds. Chinese children do not spontaneously start using French words, and German
children do not suddenly burst into Hindi. The sounds of words are acquired by imitating
others. Reading and writing are also learned, at least to some extent, by imitation, as when
the shape of a letter is meticulously copied.
When we read a story and then tell it to someone else is this imitation? I would say
that it is. The skills involved may be far more complex than the kinds of imitation I have
described above, but they have a basis in imitation and are of the same general form.
Something about the story is internalised in the listener and then reproduced when she or he
tells the story again. The same can be said of passing on religious or scientific ideas - the
reader or hearer of the ideas must internalise them in some way and then reproduce them
for another reader or listener.
I have no doubt that in the future memetics will become involved in discovering just
what the cognitive processes are that are involved in teaching, learning, instruction, and any
other kinds of cultural transmission, but for the moment I suggest that we may consider all of
them as in some way being forms of imitation, or based on the ability to imitate. I assume
that this is what Dawkins meant by “... a process which, in the broad sense, can be called
imitation”. He meant to include reading ,writing, conversation, and academic study as “in the
broad sense ... imitation” and I think we should have no hesitation in continuing to do so.
7. Conclusion
My argument has been that the definition of the meme depends on, and should
depend on, the concept of imitation. Therefore, only those things that can be passed on by
imitation should count as memes.
This means we can immediately exclude many things that a few authors have
confusingly included as memes, such as perceptions, emotional states, cognitive maps,
experiences in general, or “anything that can be the subject of an instant of experience”.
Furthermore we can build on the long history of research in animal behaviour to distinguish
imitation from contagion, and from individual and social learning, and so to eliminate from
memetics the catching of yawns or all the many things we each learn for ourselves, by
ourselves.
This, I suggest, leaves us with a simple definition of the meme that not only makes it
easy to decide what is and is not a meme, but also shows why it is that humans alone have
produced complex culture. Humans are fundamentally unique not because they are
especially clever, not just because they have big brains or language, but because they are
capable of extensive and generalised imitation. I think we will discover that it is imitation that
gave rise to our cleverness, big brains and language - and it is imitation that makes culture
possible, for only imitation gives rise to a new replicator that can propagate from brain to
brain, or from brain to artefact and back to brain. For all these reasons I suggest that we
stick with the dictionary, and define the meme as that which is passed on by imitation.
References
Baldwin,J.M. (1902) Development and Evolution. New York, Macmillan .
Bauer,G.B. and Johnson,C.M. (1994) Trained motor imitation by bottlenose dolphins
(Tursiops Truncatus) Perceptual and Motor Skills, 79, 1307-1315
Bonner,J.T. (1980) The Evolution of Culture in Animals. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University
Press.
Boyd,R. and Richerson,P.J. (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
Brodie,R. (1996) Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Seattle, Integral Press.
Call,J. and Tomasello,M. (1995) Use of social information in the problem solving of
orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and human children (Homo sapiens). Journal of
Comparative Psychology, 109, 308-320
Calvin,W. (1987) The brain as a Darwin machine. Nature, 330, 33-44
Dawkins,R. (1976) The Selfish Gene Oxford, Oxford University Press (new edition with
additional material, 1989)
Delius,J. (1989) Of mind memes and brain bugs, a natural history of culture. In W.A.Koch
(Ed) The Nature of Culture. Bochum, Germany, Bochum Publications. 26-79
Edelman,G.M. (1989) Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Fisher,J. and Hinde,R.A. (1949) The opening of milk bottles by birds. British Birds, 42, 347-
357
Gabora,L. (1997) The origin and evolution of culture and creativity. Journal of Memetics, 1,
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1997/vol1/gabora_l.html
Galef,B.G. (1992) The question of animal culture Human Nature, 3, 157-178
Heyes,C.M. (1993) Imitation, culture and cognition. Animal Behaviour, 46, 999-1010
Heyes,C.M. (1994) Imitation and culture: Longevity, fecundity and fidelity in social
transmission. In B.G.Galef, M.Mainardi and P.Valsecchi (Eds). Behavioural Aspects
of Feeding. Chur, Switzerland, Harwood. 271-287
Heyes,C.M. and Galef,B.G. (Eds) (1996) Social Learning in Animals: The roots of culture.
San Diego, CA, Academic Press.
Levy,D.A. and Nail,P.R. (1993) Contagion: A theoretical and empirical review and
reconceptualization. Genetic Social and General Psychology Monographs. 119, 235-
284
Lynch,A. (1996) Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society. N.Y. Basic
Books.
Lynch,A., Plunkett,G.M., Baker,A.J. and Jenkins,P.F. (1989) A model of cultural evolution of
chaffinch song derived with the meme concept. The American Naturalist, 133, 634-
653
Marsden,P. (1997) Crash contagion and the death of Diana: Memetics as a new paradigm
for understanding mass behaviour. Paper presented at the ‘Death of Diana’
conference. University of Sussex. 14 November 1997.
McCowan,B and Reiss,D. (1997) Vocal learning in captive bottlenose dolphins: comparison
with humans and nonhuman animals. In C.T.Snowdon and M.Hausberger (Eds)
Social Influences on Vocal Development. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
178-207
Meltzoff,A.N. (1988) Imitation, objects, tools, and the rudiments of language in human
ontogeny. Human Evolution, 3, 45-64
Meltzoff,A.N. (1996) The human infant as imitative generalist: A 20-year progress report on
infant imitation with implications for comparative psychology. In C.M.Heyes and
B.G.Galef (Eds) Social Learning in Animals: The roots of culture. San Diego, CA,
Academic Press. 347-370.
Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct New York, Morrow
Plotkin,H. (1993) Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.,
Harvard University Press.
Plotkin,H.C. (1996) Non-genetic transmission of information: Candidate cognitive processes
and the evolution of culture. Behavioural Processes, 35, 207-213
Provine,R.R. (1996) Contagious yawning and laughter: Significance for sensory feature
detection, motor pattern generation, imitation, and the evolution of social behaviour.
In Heyes,C.M. and Galef,B.G. (Eds) Social Learning in Animals: The roots of culture.
San Diego, CA, Academic Press, 179-208.
Romanes,G.J. (1882) Animal Intelligence. London, Kegan Paul Trench
Romanes,G.J. (1883) Mental Evolution in Animals. London, Kegan Paul Trench
Sherry,D.F. and Galef,B.G. (1984) Cultural transmission without imitation: milk bottle
opening by birds. Anim. Behav., 32, 937-938
Showalter,E. (1997) Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. New York,
Columbia University Press
Skinner,B.F. (1953) Science and Human Behaviour New York, Macmillan.
Thorndike,E.L. (1898) Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative
processes in animals.. Psychological Review Monographs, 2, No 8.
Tomasello,M., Kruger,A.C. and Ratner,H.H. (1993) Cultural Learning. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 16, 495-552.
Whiten,A. and Ham,R. (1992) On the nature and evolution of imitation in the animal
kingdom: Reappraisal of a century of research. In Advances in the Study of Behavior
Vol. 21. Ed. Slater,P.J.B., Rosenblatt,J.S., Beer,C. and Milinski,M. San Diego, CA,
Academic Press.
Wilkins,J.S. (1998) What’s in a meme? Reflections from the perspective of the history and
philosophy of evolutionary biology. Journal of Memetics 2,
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1997/vol1/wilkins_js.html
Williams,G.C. (1966) Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton, Princeton University
Press.
Zentall,T.R. (1996) An analysis of imitative learning in animals. In. Heyes,C.M. and
Galef,B.G. (Eds) Social Learning in Animals: The roots of culture. San Diego, CA,
Academic Press, 221-243
Zentall,T.R. and Galef,B.G. (Eds) (1988) Social Learning: Psychological and Biological
Perspectives. Hillsdale, N.J., Erlbaum.
... IC2 seems to assume a pivotal role in these theories of meaning attribution in visual-based information, as it encompasses structures in the ventral pathway and the dorsal pathway. If one considers a brand as a memeplex (Blackmore, 1998;Barnett, 2002), then it fits into these theories of object understanding, as brand memes are suited to be considered a basiclevel concept or local features. The global shape would be the brand itself. ...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction The research in consumer neuroscience has identified computational methods, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, as a significant frontier for advancement. Previously, we utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) to model brain processes related to brand preferences in a paradigm exempted from motor actions. In the current study, we revisit this data, introducing recent advancements in explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) to gain insights into this domain. By integrating fMRI data analysis, machine learning, and xAI, our study aims to search for functional brain networks that support brand perception and, ultimately, search for brain networks that disentangle between preferred and indifferent brands, focusing on the early processing stages. Methods We applied independent component analysis (ICA) to overcome the expected fMRI data’s high dimensionality, which raises hurdles in AI applications. We extracted pertinent features from the returned ICs. An ANN is then trained on this data, followed by pruning and retraining processes. We then apply explanation techniques, based on path-weights and Shapley values, to make the network more transparent, explainable, and interpretable, and to obtain insights into the underlying brain processes. Results The fully connected ANN model obtained an accuracy of 54.6%, which dropped to 50.4% after pruning. However, the retraining process allowed it to surpass the fully connected network, achieving an accuracy of 55.9%. The path-weights and Shapley-based analysis concludes that, regarding brand perception, the expected initial participation of the primary visual system is followed. Other brain areas participate in early processing and discriminate between preferred and indifferent brands, such as the cuneal and the lateral occipital cortices. Discussion The most important finding is that a split between processing brands|preferred from brands|indifferent may occur during early processing stages, still in the visual system. However, we found no evidence of a “decision pipeline” that would yield if a brand is preferred or indifferent. The results suggest the existence of a “tagging”-like process in parallel flows in the extrastriate. Network training dynamics aggregate specific processes within the hidden nodes by analyzing the model’s hidden layer. This yielded that some nodes contribute to both global brand appraisal and specific brand category classification, shedding light on the neural substrates of decision-making in response to brand stimuli.
... Memes are a sign which, under some distinctive feature, can be recruited by an interpretive process within a larger system as re-presenting something else, conveying information into that system and reorganizing it concerning something else (Preez,Lombard,p.259). Memes, which are cultural information that are copied by imitation (Blackmore, 1998), can transform from a single event to a shared social phenomenon through the process of mimicking, remixing, or repackaging (Taecharungroj, Nueangjamnong, 2015, p.289). Often, modifications add the profile of the original idea, thus turning it into a phenomenon that transgresses social and cultural boundaries (Bauckhage, 2011, p.42). ...
Article
This contribution discusses salient aspects of the development of ceramics technology from its invention to the present, and the role ceramics have played during the cultural development and technological progress of ancient and modern societies. The conjecture is being advanced that the transformation of ceramic production modes from holistic, that is, individualistic processes to prescriptive, that is, cooperative industrially determined technologies had a profound and lasting impact on the social, economic, and cultural fabric of all societies. In addition, the chaotic and thus, nondeterministic interaction of ceramic technology and society, and the transfer of information among potters will be described in terms of the concept of strange attractors as well as sets of self‐normalizing ‘memes’ (ideas) in a Lamarckian and/or Darwinian mode. Such specific ideas drive cultural and, by inference, technological evolution of societies.
Article
Full-text available
Memes are not new concepts, but they have garnered popularity recently. They are a prevalent form of communication on various social media platforms. However, due to a lack of concrete literature (Al Rashdi, 2020), there is still some initial scepticism surrounding them. This paper uses a systematic literature review to create a pool of research papers to be examined to chart the conceptual development of memes, determine how they are used in different fields, and present a vision of memes in the near future. It identifies eleven areas which were studied in parallel to memes, suggesting possible meme applications and development. It adopts the PRISMA 2020 framework to ensure systematic screening and reporting of relevant papers from various databases.
Preprint
Full-text available
[The following text is the English version provided by the author of Chapter 11 of COCA, J. R. (Ed.) (2007). Varia biológica. Filosofía, ciencia y tecnología, León: Universidad de León, pp. 221-260. The original textual citations, which were all in Spanish, were translated inversely, so slight differences may have occurred. That publication is available at https://bit.ly/3vriQbY].
Chapter
This chapter explores content creation in relation to internet memes and the origin of the concept of memes as explained by Richard Dawkins' meme theory. It argues that as transmitters and replicators of cultural information memes, including social media content have the potential to serve as powerful and effective vehicles for disseminating cultural information and creating cultural spaces. For students, social media use is often a part of their daily routine and lifestyle with a focus on professional use. Using the case study of a first-year course at an HBCU, the chapter explores how the “everything is content” philosophy can be applied in instruction to curate a cultural classroom space, foster students' abilities to make connections between academic and social content and encourage students' critical thinking of their role in the creation and sharing of cultural through their social media use.
Thesis
Full-text available
Bu çalışmada, dini düşünce ve davranış örüntülerinin evrimsel psikolojik perspektiften incelenmesi sonucunda ortaya çıkan bilimsel yaklaşımlar incelenmektedir. Çalışmada öncelikle evrimsel psikolojinin kuramsal ve metodolojik temellerine değinilmiştir. Bu bölümlerin öncelikli hedefi evrimsel psikolojik yaklaşımın diğer davranış bilimsel yaklaşımlardan farkını vurgulamaktır. Kuramsal altyapısı evrimsel biyolojiye dayanan; organizmaların edimlerini ve bilişsel süreçlerini uyumluluk başarısı üzerinden incelemeye tabi tutan evrimsel psikoloji yaklaşımı, disiplinleşme sürecinde psikolojinin çeşitli konularına getirdiği farklı yorumlarla yalnızca bilim camiasını değil; dijital medya okuryazarlığının yüksek olduğu popülasyonları, özellikle Z jenerasyonunun insan ilişkilerini folk psikolojik anlamda yorumlama edimlerini de etkilediği gözlemlenmektedir. Konunun önemine binaen; alanın temel kaynaklarına erişilmiş, evrimsel psikolojik yöntem sistematik derlemeye tabi tutulmuştur. Çalışmanın ikinci bölümü ise, birinci bölümün kuramsal çerçevesi üzerine inşa edilmiştir. Evrimsel psikolojik literatür din olgusu özelinde çözümlemeye tabi tutulmuştur. Modern din psikolojisi yaklaşımları arasında başat yaklaşımlardan biri haline gelmiş olan evrimsel din psikolojisi; dini düşünce ve davranış örüntülerinin, evrimsel psikolojik metodoloji bağlamında uyumluluk başarısı parametreleri gözetilerek incelendiği bilimsel disiplindir. Disipline dair genel bilgi okuyucuya sunulduktan sonra alan içi temel yaklaşımlara değinilmiştir. Bu yaklaşımlar; adaptasyonizm ve yanürüncülüktür. Adaptasyonist görüşe göre; dini düşünce ve davranış özgün birer v modül olarak evrilmiştir ve Homo sapiens türüne adaptif getirileri bulunmaktadır. Bu sebeple hem genetik hem de memetik olarak sonraki jenerasyonlara aktarım olasılığı yüksektir. Yan-ürüncü perspektife göre ise; dini düşünce ve davranış başlı başına birer modül değildir, farklı adaptif modüllerin bir yan-ürünü olarak ortaya çıkmıştır ve farklı çevresel koşullarda, adaptif yahut maladaptif özellikler gösterebilmektedir. Çalışmada yaklaşımlar örneklerle zenginleştirilerek açıklanmış, filojenik tarihsel projeksiyonun modern yansımaları ışığında uygulanması gereken metodolojik çözümlere değinilerek çalışma sonuçlandırılmıştır.
Article
Full-text available
This paper is intended as a focal article to raise philosophical issues about the nature of memes and memetic theory. To bring consistency to memetic analysis, researchers need to understand and agree upon the theoretical role of memes and the generalized model of evolution in which it occurs as a theoretical term. To help this, I have traced the source of Dawkins' conception of memes from GC Williams' evolutionary gene and through to the Hull-Dawkins Distinction between replicators and interactors and Hull's notion of lineages and the idea of an individual in biology. The complexity of biological modes of evolution suggests that conceptualizing memes as disease pathogens is not an alternative to evolutionary models of memetic development. I argue for a close and strict analogy between biology and memetics. I introduce the idea of a memetic individual or profile to clarify the ontology of memes and their ecologies. Some promising methods from biology and other disciplines such as Hamming Distance and Wagner groundplan divergence methods are suggested. A glossary of mainly biological technical terms used and introduced neologisms is included.
Chapter
For at least 30 years, there have been close parallels between studies of birdsong development and those of the development of human language. Both song and language require species-specific stimulation at a sensitive period in development and subsequent practice through subsong and plastic song in birds and babbling in infant humans leading to the development of characteristic vocalisations for each species. This book illustrates how social interactions during development can shape vocal learning and extend the sensitive period beyond infancy and how social companions can induce flexibility even into adulthood. Social companions in a wide range of species including birds and humans but also cetaceans and nonhuman primates play important roles in shaping vocal production as well as the comprehension and appropriate usage of vocal communication. This book will be required reading for students and researchers interested in animal and human communication and its development.
Chapter
(from the introduction) describes a [neuroethological] research program concerned with ldots involuntary copying / in this case, the S of study is the species one might imagine to be least likely to exhibit mindless imitation ldots human beings / in a series of ingenious studies involving everything from yawning through one's nose to listening to laughter played backwards, Provine seeks to describe the critical features that release such contagious behaviors, to define the conditions under which they occur, and to cast light on their potential functions (from the chapter) begins with the description of the motor acts of yawning & laughter because ldots the motor act is both the stimulus and the response, and defines the nature of the stimulus feature detector supporting contagion
Article
The cultural evolution of song in populations of chaffinches from New Zealand was analyzed using the meme concept. Songs were broken down into their constituent memes (individual syllable types, their variants, or groups of linked syllables), and patterns of geographical variation for memes of different length were assessed. Multivariate spatial-autocorrelation analyses revealed a clinal pattern of variation, with close populations sharing more memes than would be expected at random and the inverse for populations that are far apart. Univariate spatial autocorrelation of syllable variants showed a random pattern attributable to high levels of mutation and random drift at this level. Syllable types, by contrast, are significantly correlated in their frequencies across populations and therefore have similar patterns. This is probably due to a major migrational event during colonization. Using Slatkin's method of rare alleles, we estimated that approximately 10 syllables per generation enter each population ...
Article
Human beings are imitative generalists. We can immediately imitate a wide range of behaviors with great facility, whether they be vocal maneuvers, body postures, or actions on objects. The ontogeny of this skill has been an enduring question in developmental psychology. Classical theory holds that the ability to imitate facial gestures is a milestone that is passed at about one year. Before this time infants are thought to lack the perceptual-cognitive sophistication necessary to match a gesture they can see with one they cannot see themselves perform. A second developmental milestone is the capacity for deferred imitation, i.e. imitation of an absent model. This is said to emerge at about 18 months, in close synchrony with other higher-order activities such as object permanence and tool use, as part of a general cognitive shift from a purely sensory-motor level of functioning to one that allows language. Research suggests that the imitative capacity of young infants has been underestimated. Human infants are capable of imitating facial gestures at birth, with infants less than one day old manifesting this skill. Moreover recent experiments have established deferred imitation well before the predicted age of 18 months. Studies discussed here show that 9-month-olds can duplicate acts after a delay of 24 hours, and that 14-month-olds can retain and duplicate as many as five actions over a 1-week delay. These new findings re-raise questions about the relation between nonverbal cognitive development and language development: What aspects, if any, of these two domains are linked? A hypothesis is delineated that predicts certain very specific relations between particular cognitive and semantic achievements during the one-word stage, and data are reported supporting this hypothesis. Specifically, relations are reported between: (a) the development of object permanence and the use of words encoding disappearance, (b) means-ends understanding (as manifest in tool use) and words encoding success and failure, and (c) categorization behavior and the onset of the naming explosion. This research on human ontogeny suggests close and highly specific links between aspects of early language and thought.
Article
This paper examines the significance of imitation in non-human animals with respect to the phylogenetic origins of culture and cognitive complexity. It is argued that both imitation (learning about behaviour through nonspecific observation) and social learning (learning about the environment through conspecific observation) can mediate social transmission of information, and that neither is likely to play an important role in supporting behavioural traditions or culture. Current evidence suggests that imitation is unlikely to do this because it does not insulate information from modification through individual learning in the retention period between acquisition and re-transmission. Although insignificant in relation to culture, imitation apparently involves complex and little-understood cognitive operations. It is unique in requiring animals spontaneously to equate extrinsic visual input with proprioceptive and/or kinaesthetic feedback from their own actions, but not in requiring or implicating self-consciousness, representation, metarepresentation or a capacity for goal-directed action.