Thursday, July 31, 2008

Repeat after me on the PS3

According to an experiment on a bird called a budgerigar, the bird finds it easier to learn by imitation than by ignoring observed behavior of another bird. Automatic imitation has been accepted in humans, but the authors claim this is the first evidence of automatic imitation in birds.

This suggests to me that many tasks can be learned by observing others perform the same. In my thesis, I had already been incorporating imitation for learning into training behavior so that users could begin to pick up elements of a foreign language without any verbal instruction. The process primed me to look for examples of priming player behavior through imitation in other videogames.

Last night while I was playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3), I arrived where my plane had crashed. I noticed one of the thugs sliding down a rope. It struck me as an odd way to set the scene of the thug's camp. After I wiped them out (actually I didn't want to kill these anonymous brown-skinned fellows, but that's the only way the game taught me to progress the plot), I was stumped on how to trigger the next encounter or cutscene. Then I saw the rope. With very little conscious thought, I climbed. I had imitated the person I had seen in the distance from the overlooking cliff. Through storytelling and animation, my behavior was artfully designed to discover the next scene's trigger volume! That was much more satisfying than waiting for an L2 camera hint.

An old news release from University of Oregon claims that observing behavior with the intent to imitate enhances learning through activating similar regions of the brain as practicing the activity itself. It seems reasonable to imagine that an intelligent species, who have largely acquired their skills through direct imitation from other members (mentors or teachers), would have brains primed to learn through imitation. It seems elegant that the act of observing to imitate a behavior is in effect similar to a simulation of the behavior itself. It is a testament to the intelligence of the brain that observing another's behavior in a low-resolution video is capable of transforming the witnessed demonstration into a simulation of one's own motor systems performing equivalent behavior. Read the article.

Now I'd like to know how similar the neural activation of observing to imitate is to that of mental rehearsal of an activity, which has been claimed to improve skill and also simulates motor activation of the rehearsed behavior.

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