Abstract
Social learning, the ability to learn from the social environment, is extremely important for humans. Social learning ranges from having one’s attention called to some aspect of the environment (stimulus enhancement) to high fidelity imitation of a model’s behavior. High fidelity imitation, which includes the detailed reproduction of both necessary and unnecessary behaviors, is a pervasive and very distinctive adaptation in humans. In contrast, replicating outcomes with limited attention to specific behaviors is more common in other primates (emulation). As we will see, human sociality is deeply dependent on high fidelity imitation. In recent years, imitation has become recognized as central to defining features of humans such as intelligence, language, and cumulative culture.