The gesture that came back unasked
During an interview on the ward, a nurse standing nearby claps her hands twice to get a colleague's attention. Without any prompting or apparent awareness, the patient being interviewed claps his hands twice as well, a beat behind her, and then continues answering the interviewer's question as though nothing had happened. A few minutes later, when the interviewer scratches the side of their own face while thinking, the patient makes the same motion almost immediately afterward. When asked afterward whether he noticed himself doing this, he seems genuinely unaware that he had copied either gesture.
This is echopraxia: the involuntary, automatic imitation of simple actions observed in another person nearby (clapping, then a face-scratch), occurring without any apparent purpose of the patient's own and, as the follow-up question confirms, without his awareness that it happened. The repetition across two separate, unrelated gestures from two different people is what distinguishes this from a single coincidental echo, and his lack of awareness afterward is a key recognition feature separating it from ordinary, voluntary social mimicry.
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Ch. 8, 'Disorders of Motor Behaviour'.