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The act of mimicking or copying; also called modeling or social learning.

Unlike behaviorist models of learning through various forms of conditioning, imitation occurs naturally without outside stimulus or reward. In a child's early years, an enormous amount of learning is done through imitation of parents, peers, and modeling based on other stimuli, such as television. Imitative learning occurs in primates, both human and nonhuman, but has not conclusively been proved to exist in other species.

The foremost researcher in the area of imitative learning is Albert Bandura, whose work has focused on how modeling—especially the modeling of aggressive behavior—affects...