Putting all of this together, then, it looks like the pendulum has swung back toward a focus on the influence of movement ability on imitation. Early on, infants are trying to imitate actions they can perform themselves. These findings are quite consistent with a lot of research about the way that adults think about actions. Generally speaking, even adults understand actions by thinking about how we could perform them ourselves. It is just a short step from that understanding to doing the same thing. In that way, infants may not be that different from adults. Perhaps we're guilty of rich interpretation of adult performance as well.