Socioeconomic status and self–other processing: socioeconomic status predicts interference in the automatic imitation task

Automatic imitation in school-aged children

Children imitate others for different reasons: To learn from others and to reach social goals such as affiliation or prosociality. So far, imitative acts have been measured using diverging methods in children and adults. Here, we investigated whether school-aged children's imitation can be measured via their automatic imitation with a classical imitation-inhibition task (Brass et al., 2000) as has been used in adults. To this end, we measured automatic imitation in N=94 7-8-year-olds and N=10 adults. The results were similar in children and adults: Observing actions that are incongruent with participants' actions interferes with their responses resulting in increased reaction times and error rates. This shows that assessing automatic imitation via the imitation-inhibition task is feasible in children, and creates the basis for future studies to compare the behaviour of different age groups with the same imitation task.

The effects of socioeconomic status and situational power on self-other processing in the automatic imitation task

Previous work using physiological measures has shown that socioeconomic status and social power both influence the degree to which people are attuned to the actions of others. However, it is unclear whether such effects on brain activity translate into behaviourally significant outcomes. Here, we examined differences in automatic imitation between individuals varying in SES and power from the local community population. The automatic imitation task involves participants making actions in response to a symbolic cue while simultaneously being exposed to an action that is incongruent or congruent with the cued response. Patterns of interference in reaction time and error rate reveal the extent to which a person is susceptible to influence from the actions of other-what we refer to as "the degree of social attunement". We found that individuals from low SES backgrounds and those in the low power priming group exhibited more interference than individuals from high SES backgrounds and those in the high power priming group. However, we did not observe an interaction between chronic status and the power group. We discuss our results in relation to broader behavioural patterns exhibited by individuals at varying levels of a social structure.

Imitation or Polarity Correspondence? Behavioural and Neurophysiological Evidence for the Confounding Influence of Orthogonal Spatial Compatibility on Measures of Automatic Imitation

During social interactions, humans tend to imitate one another involuntarily. To investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms driving this tendency, researchers often employ stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) tasks to assess the influence that action observation has on action execution. This is referred to as automatic imitation (AI). The stimuli used frequently in SRC procedures to elicit AI often confound action-related with other nonsocial influences on behaviour; however, in response to the rotated hand-action stimuli employed increasingly, AI partly reflects unspecific up-right/down-left biases in stimulus-response mapping. Despite an emerging awareness of this confounding orthogonal spatial-compatibility effect, psychological and neuroscientific research into social behaviour continues to employ these stimuli to investigate AI. To increase recognition of this methodological issue, the present study measured the systematic influence of orthogonal spatial effects on behavioural and neurophysiological measures of AI acquired with rotated hand-action stimuli in SRC tasks. In Experiment 1, behavioural data from a large sample revealed that complex orthogonal spatial effects exert an influence on AI over and above any topographical similarity between observed and executed actions. Experiment 2 reproduced this finding in a more systematic, within-subject design, and high-density electroencephalography revealed that electrocortical expressions of AI elicited also are modulated by orthogonal spatial compatibility. Finally, source localisations identified a collection of cortical areas sensitive to this spatial confound, including nodes of the multiple-demand and semantic-control networks. These results indicate that AI measured on SRC procedures with the rotated hand stimuli used commonly might reflect neurocognitive mechanisms associated with spatial associations rather than imitative tendencies.