Monkey See, Monkey Do
This is the title of a short article on mirror neurons in New Scientist.
Pier Ferrari at the University of Parma, Italy, and colleagues tested 21 newborn Macaques by holding each in front of a researcher who made various facial expressions.
The article has links to two movie clips showing the young Macaques beginning to imitate the researcher.
The study indicates that the capacity for imitation occurred earlier in the primate evolutionary tree than previously thought, and before the rhesus monkey ancestor split from the human lineage, about 25 million years ago.
Yet another apparently characteristic that was thought to be uniquely human, that was then found to be shared by young apes, and is now shown to be an even more general attribute of sentient creatures.
We have recently been doing some informal expriements with a kitten and an older cat that seem to have remarkable powers of mimicry. Not at the same level as the Macaques, but still mimicking head position and mouth opening. I cannot find any published research on mimickery in cats, but I shall ask around and report back.
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