Learned imitative reinforcers

This is a difficult concept for some students to get, so I'll see if I can supplement Malott's discussion a little bit.

If you do something and I do the same thing, I can tell that I'm doing the same thing you're doing because I can see that we're doing the same thing. If you say something and I say the same thing, then I can hear that I said the same thing. In other words, I know when my actions match yours because of the perceptual feedback I get from you and from myself. But it goes beyond seeing and hearing. If you raise your arm in the air and I do the same, even if my eyes are closed I'm getting perceptual (proprioceptive) feedback informing me that my arm is raised. All of these types of perceptual feedback are stimuli.

If a child imitates someone else's behavior and it's reinforced, then those reinforcers are paired with those stimuli that inform the child that their behaviors are matching the model's. When this has happened a sufficient number of times and in a variety of imitative situations, then stimuli showing us that our behavior matches a model's become learned reinforcers. From that point on, whenever we perceive that our behavior matches someone else's, that matching (imitative) behavior will be automatically reinforced by those learned imitative reinforcers.

That's how generalized imitation happens.