Imitative learning occurs when an individual acquires a novel
action as a result of watching another individual produce it. It
can be distinguished from other, lower-level social learning
mechanisms such as local enhancement, stimulus enhancement, and
contagion (see Imitation: Definition, Evidence, and Mechanisms).
Most critically within this context, it can also be
distinguished from emulation in which an individual learns about
the affordances and/or causal properties of the objects involved
in a demonstration rather than the particular actions used by
the model. In stark contrast to emulation, the term “over-
imitation” is sometimes used to refer to action copying that is
so faithful that it includes the casually irrelevant and
unnecessary actions of a model (technically, however, this term
is better reserved for cases in which a learner copies a model’s
unnecessary actions even when they have been explicitly
instructed not to do so). Human culture is qualitatively
different from that of any other species.