Many everyday tasks are learned through imitation, particularly those that involve a sequence of actions. Many different variables can affect imitative performance. This work consists of a series of experiments that explore several of these variables, using a complex imitation task designed to strike a balance between controllable stimuli and similarity to real world tasks. First, I explain this task in detail and discuss the advantages that it provides over other tasks used to study imitation. Next, I present three experiments that explore the age-related effects on several aspects of performance on this task, including overall accuracy and order errors. Older adults' performance is significantly worse than young adults and this effect is largely due to load-related changes in performance and not to perceptual or maintenance factors. I further extend these results by examining the source of this age-related decrease in performance; older adults seem less able to use supplementary information than do young adults. Following that, I explore how learning affects performance on a single stimulus by examining young adults' performance during a learning paradigm while using an eye tracker to record their eye movements. Expectations about the direction of the stimulus movements are visible in anticipatory eye movements after only a single repetition of a stimulus. In addition, violations of these expectations delay eye movements and affect memory for the unexpected movement. The last line of investigation examined the effects of expertise in several domains on imitative performance. The results suggest that expertise in the studied domains has no effect on imitative performance. However, several limitation in the nature of the experiment and the participants leave open the possibility for future research. Together, these studies illuminate how several factors affect imitation and suggest several avenues for further exploration.