The principal difference between motor and cognitive imitation is the type of rule (and stimulus) that is learned and copied by the observer.
The following example illustrates the difference between cognitive and motor-spatial imitation: Imagine someone overlooking someone's shoulder and stealing their automated teller machine (ATM) password.
On the other, the thief could ignore the spatial patterning of the observed responses and instead focus on the particular items that were touched, generating an abstract numerical rule, independently of where they are in space: 3-1-5-9.
If the numbers were in a different location—that is, if the numbers on the ATM's keypad were scrambled with every attempt to enter a password—the thief would, nonetheless, reproduce the target password because they learned a cognitive (i.e., an abstract, item-specific serial rule), rather than a spatial rule (i.e., an observable motor-spatial pattern).
To isolate cognitive from motor imitation, Subiaul and colleagues trained two rhesus macaques to respond, in a prescribed order, to different sets of photographs that were displayed simultaneously on a touch-sensitive monitor.
This result excludes the possibility that 3-year-olds' motor-spatial imitation problems are due to difficulty learning (i.e., encoding and recalling) novel spatial rules in general.
Children's success in the goal emulation condition shows that social learning may be achieved by social reasoning (inferring goals) and causal inferences (error detection), independently of any domain-specific imitation learning mechanism.
Subiaul and colleagues have argued that these results are consistent with the hypothesis that imitation learning is domain-specific, not domain-general.