Embodied Resonance

2018 ◽  
pp. 416-432
Author(s):  
Vittorio Gallese ◽  
Corrado Sinigaglia
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Mirror Neurons ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Action Execution ◽  
Brain Areas ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Macaque Monkeys

Mental simulation was claimed to provide a distinctive way of gaining knowledge about others’ actions and thoughts since the late 1980s. A decade later, the discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys and the evidence of mirror brain areas in humans presented a new angle on this claim, suggesting also an embodied approach to simulation. The aim of the present chapter is to introduce and discuss this embodied approach and its role in basic social cognition. In doing this, we shall start by characterizing the distinctive features of embodied simulation (ES), especially in relation to its its motor aspects. Then, we shall provide evidence for the claim that ES may be critically involved in understanding others’ actions. Finally, we shall explore the conjecture that ES might involve a common ground for action execution and observation not only at the functional but also at the phenomenological level.

scholarly journals Before and below ‘theory of mind’: embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social cognition

2007 ◽  
Vol 362 (1480) ◽  
pp. 659-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Gallese
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Mirror Neurons ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mirror Neuron System ◽  
Mirror Neuron ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Automatic Translation ◽  
The Brain

The automatic translation of folk psychology into newly formed brain modules specifically dedicated to mind-reading and other social cognitive abilities should be carefully scrutinized. Searching for the brain location of intentions, beliefs and desires— as such —might not be the best epistemic strategy to disclose what social cognition really is. The results of neurocognitive research suggest that in the brain of primates, mirror neurons, and more generally the premotor system, play a major role in several aspects of social cognition, from action and intention understanding to language processing. This evidence is presented and discussed within the theoretical frame of an embodied simulation account of social cognition. Embodied simulation and the mirror neuron system underpinning it provide the means to share communicative intentions, meaning and reference, thus granting the parity requirements of social communication.

scholarly journals Joint Action without Mutual Beliefs

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Figà Talamanca
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Joint Action ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Cooperative Hunting ◽  
Mutual Awareness ◽  
Shared Practice ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Joint action among human beings is characterized by using elaborate cognitive feats, such as representing the mental states of others about a certain state of affairs. It is still debated how these capacities evolved in the hominid lineage. I suggest that the consolidation of a shared practice over time can foster the predictability of other’s behavior. This might facilitate the evolutionary passage from inferring what others might know by simply seeing them and what they are viewing towards a mutual awareness of each other’s beliefs. I will examine the case for cooperative hunting in one chimpanzee community and argue that it is evidence that they have the potential to achieve common ground, suggesting that the consolidation of a practice might have supported the evolution of higher social cognition in the hominid lineage.

scholarly journals What Happened to Mirror Neurons?

2021 ◽  
pp. 174569162199063
Author(s):  
Cecilia Heyes ◽  
Caroline Catmur
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Motor Learning ◽  
Brain Stimulation ◽  
Mirror Neurons ◽  
Body Movement ◽  
Mirror Neuron ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Action Understanding ◽  
Brain Areas ◽  
Visual Motor

Ten years ago, Perspectives in Psychological Science published the Mirror Neuron Forum, in which authors debated the role of mirror neurons in action understanding, speech, imitation, and autism and asked whether mirror neurons are acquired through visual-motor learning. Subsequent research on these themes has made significant advances, which should encourage further, more systematic research. For action understanding, multivoxel pattern analysis, patient studies, and brain stimulation suggest that mirror-neuron brain areas contribute to low-level processing of observed actions (e.g., distinguishing types of grip) but not to high-level action interpretation (e.g., inferring actors’ intentions). In the area of speech perception, although it remains unclear whether mirror neurons play a specific, causal role in speech perception, there is compelling evidence for the involvement of the motor system in the discrimination of speech in perceptually noisy conditions. For imitation, there is strong evidence from patient, brain-stimulation, and brain-imaging studies that mirror-neuron brain areas play a causal role in copying of body movement topography. In the area of autism, studies using behavioral and neurological measures have tried and failed to find evidence supporting the “broken-mirror theory” of autism. Furthermore, research on the origin of mirror neurons has confirmed the importance of domain-general visual-motor associative learning rather than canalized visual-motor learning, or motor learning alone.

Neoteny and Social Cognition: A Neuroscientific Perspective on Embodiment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Gallese
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Somatic Development ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Evo Devo

The chapter will address the notion of embodiment from a neuroscientific perspective, by emphasizing the crucial role played by bodily relations and sociality on the evolution and development of distinctive features of human cognition. The neurophysiological level of description is here accounted for in terms of bodily-formatted representations and discussed by replying to criticisms recently raised against this notion. The neuroscientific approach here proposed is critically framed and discussed against the background of the Evo-Devo focus on a little explored feature of human beings in relation to social cognition: their neotenic character. Neoteny refers to the slowed or delayed physiological and/or somatic development of an individual. Such development is largely dependent on the quantity and quality of interpersonal relationships the individual is able to establish with her/his adult peers. It is proposed that human neoteny further supports the crucial role played by embodiment, here spelled out by adopting the explanatory framework of embodied simulation, in allowing humans to engage in social relations, and make sense of others’ behaviors.This approach can fruitfully be used to shed new light onto non propositional forms of communication and social understanding and onto distinctive human forms of meaning making, like the experience of man-made fictional worlds.

What happened to Homo habilis? (Language and mirror neurons)

1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Rizzolatti
Keyword(s):  
Mirror Neurons ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Action Observation ◽  
Premotor Cortex ◽  
Physiological Data ◽  
Action Execution ◽  
Homo Habilis ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Linguistic Functions ◽  
Evolutionary Continuity

The evolutionary continuity between the prespeech functions of premotor cortex and its new linguistic functions, the main thesis of MacNeilage's target article, is confirmed by the recent discovery of “mirror” neurons in monkeys and a corresponding action-observation/action-execution matching system in humans. Physiological data (and other considerations) appear to indicate, however, that brachiomanual gestures played a greater role in language evolution than MacNeilage would like to admit.

scholarly journals Lower [3H]Citalopram Binding in Brain Areas Related to Social Cognition in Alcoholics

2014 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olli Kärkkäinen ◽  
Virpi Laukkanen ◽  
Tuija Haukijärvi ◽  
Hannu Kautiainen ◽  
Jari Tiihonen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Brain Areas

From mirror neurons to embodied simulation: A new neuroscientific perspective on intersubjectivity

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S2) ◽  
pp. 2127-2127
Author(s):  
V. Gallese
Keyword(s):  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Mirror Neurons ◽  
Social World ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Body System ◽  
Functional Level ◽  
Mind Reading ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
The World ◽  
Motor Representations

Our seemingly effortless capacity of conceiving of the acting bodies inhabiting our social world as goal-oriented individuals like us depends on the constitution of a shared “we-centric” space. I have proposed that this shared manifold space can be characterized at the functional level as embodied simulation, a basic functional mechanism by means of which our brain/body system models its interactions with the world.The mirroring mechanism for action and other mirroring mechanisms in our brain represent sub-personal instantiations of embodied simulation. Embodied simulation provides a new empirically based notion of intersubjectivity, viewed first and foremost as intercorporeity. Embodied simulation challenges the notion that Folk-psychology is the sole account of interpersonal understanding. Before and below mind reading is intercorporeity as the main source of knowledge we directly gather about others.By means of embodied simulation we can map others’ actions onto our own motor representations, as well as others’ emotions and sensations onto our own viscero-motor and somatosensory representations. “Representation”, as used here, refers to a particular type of content, generated by the relations that our situated and inter-acting brain-body system instantiates with the world. Such content is pre-linguistic and pre-theoretical, but nevertheless has attributes normally and uniquely attributed to conceptual content.Social cognition is not only explicitly reasoning about the contents of someone else's mind. Embodied simulation, gives us a direct insight of other minds thus enabling our capacity to empathize with others.This proposal opens new perspectives on our understanding of autism and other psychopathological states such as schizophrenia.

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