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Response to de Bruin and Gallagher : Embodied simulation as resue is a productive explanation of a basic form of mind-reading
No full textLa nascita della intersoggettività, Lo sviluppo del Sé tra psicodinamica e neurobiologia
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What is so special about embodied simulation?
No full textSimulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the past few years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic social cogni- tion, demonstrating that people reuse their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others
How the body in action shapes the self
No full textIn the present paper we address the issue of the role of the body in shaping our basic self-awareness. It is generally taken for granted that basic bodily self-awareness has primarily to do with proprioception. Here we challenge this assumption by arguing from both a phenomenological and a neurophysiological point of view that our body is primarily given to us as a manifold of action possibilities that cannot be reduced to any form of proprioceptive awareness. By discussing the notion of affordance and the spatiality of the body we show that both have to be construed in terms of the varying range of our power for action. Finally, we posit that the motor roots of our bodily self-awareness shed new light on both the common ground for and the distinguishing criterium between self and other The properties of the mirror mechanism indicate that the same action possibilities constituting our bodily self also allow us to make sense of other bodily selves inasmuch as their action possibilities can be mapped onto our own ones. Our proposal may pave the way towards a general deconstruction of the different layers at the core of our full-fledged sense of self and others
Motor Cognition and Its Role in Philogeny and Ontogeny of Action Understanding.
No full textSocial life rests in large part on the capacity to understand the intentional behavior of others. Which are the origins of this capacity? How is to construe its development in ontogenesis? By taking for granted that action understanding can be explained only in terms of the ability to read the mind of others, i.e. to represent them as having mental states, the traditional view claims the existence of sharp discontinuity in both its phylogeny and ontogeny. Over the last few years this view has been challenged by a number of ethological and psychological studies as well as by several neurophysiological findings. In particular, the functional properties of mirror neuron systems and its direct matching mechanism indicate that action understanding is primarily based on the motor cognition that underpins one’s own capacity to act. The aim of this paper is to elaborate and motivate the pivotal role of such a motor cognition, providing a biologically plausible and theoretically unitary account for the phylogeny and ontogeny of action understanding and also its impairment, like in the case of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
Understanding action within the motor system
No full textWe challenge Cook et al.'s claim about the vagueness of the notion of action understanding in relation with mirror neurons. We show the multidimensional nature of action understanding and provide a definition of motor-based action understanding, shedding new light on the various components of action understanding and on their relationship. Finally, we propose an alternative perspective on the origin of mirror neurons, stressing the necessity to abandon the dichotomy between genetic and associative hypotheses
The bodily self as power for action
No full textThe aim of our paper is to show that there is a sense of body that is enactive in nature and that enables to
capture the most primitive sense of self. We will argue that the body is primarily given to us as source or
power for action, i.e., as the variety of motor potentialities that define the horizon of the world in which
we live, by populating it with things at hand to which we can be directed and with other bodies we
can interact with. We will show that this sense of body as bodily self is, on the one hand, antecedent the
distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership, and, on the other, it enables and refines such
distinction, providing a conceptual framework for the coherent interpretation of a variety of behavioral
and neuropsychological data. We will conclude by positing that the basic experiences we entertain of
our selves as bodily selves are from the very beginning driven by our interactions with other bodies as
they are underpinned by the mirror mechanism
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