I had the good fortune to have an interest in the origins of mind kindled in the heady atmosphere of Jerry Bruner's group at Oxford – alongside A. Meltzoff, as it happens – so it is apt to begin this chapter with the conception of imitation that Bruner offered in his insightful analysis of “The nature and uses of immaturity” (Bruner, 1972).

Bruner highlighted two sophisticated cognitive aspects of imitation. First, it involves the imitator in a complex “deictic” mental transformation, translating from an act originally done from the perspective of the model (yet perceived from the perspective of the imitator) to what is involved in doing a matching act from the imitator's own perspective. Second, Bruner suggested imitation may involve “the construction of an action pattern by the appropriate sequencing of a set of constituent subroutines to match the model.” Here, Bruner is suggesting that imitation of a complex behavioral structure might be built by the orchestration of existing action-components.

Each of these two “sophisticated abilities” are subjects of this chapter. That concerning the translation from model's to self's actions I address later in the chapter, considering whether apes evidence perception-action mappings akin to those of humans analyzed elsewhere in this volume. I will address the second ability Bruner highlighted by describing experiments on imitation of the sequential and hierarchical structure of actions by chimpanzees and children.