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Moderators
·Gloria Origgi
·Dan Sperber
Guest Panel
·Michael Arbib
·Cristiano Castelfranchi
·Laila Craighero
·Jérôme Dokic
·Peter Ford F. Dominey
·Luciano Fadiga
·Leonardo Fogassi
·Nivedita Gangopadhyay
·Robert Gordon
·Julie Grèzes
·Giyoo Hatano & Kayoko Inagaki
·Pascal Ludwig
·Hugo Mercier
·Alva Noë
·Kevin O'Regan
·Elisabeth Pacherie
·Joëlle Proust
·Anne Reboul
·François Recanati
·Giacomo Rizzolati
·Dan Sperber
·Dario Taraborelli
·Virginia Volterra
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The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of macaques and their implications for human brain evolution is one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade. Mirror neurons are active when the monkeys perform certain tasks, but they also fire when the monkeys watch someone else perform the same specific task. There is evidence that a similar observation/action matching system exists in humans. The mirror system is sometimes considered to represent a primitive version, or possibly a precursor in phylogeny, of a simulation heuristic that might underlie mindreading.
Today, mirror neurons play a major explanatory role in the understanding of a number of human features, from imitation to empathy, mindreading and language learning. It has also been claimed that damages in these cerebral structures can be responsible for mental deficits such as autism. The virtual workshop will address the theoretical implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. The discussion will try to set the explanatory scope of the phenomenon, and evaluate to what extent it can provide a new empirical ground for a variety of human mental abilities.
This workshop has been sponsored by the European Science Foundation as a network activity of the Programme Origins of Man, Languages and Language (OMLL). In partnership with
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The shared circuits model. How control, mirroring, and simulation can enable imitation and mind reading
Susan L. Hurley
Imitation and mind reading are human socio-cognitive skills, which contribute in many ways to what it is like to be a person. The shared circuits model explains how they could be enabled in subpersonal functional terms, that is, in terms of mechanisms of control, mirroring and simulation. Neural mirror systems may provide part of the implementation of this functional model. The model connects a shared information space for perception and action with a shared information space for self and other, while at the same time illustrating how the distinctions between perception and action, self and other, and possible and actual can be overlaid on these shared information spaces. In this model, information about intentional agents arrives in the first person plural: without distinction or inference between self and other. The model avoids the common conception of perception and action as separate and peripheral to central cognition. Rather, it develops the implications of an active view of perception for the perception of action, and shows how informational resources for embodied social cognition can be built on those for active perception.
Date of publication: 15 February 2005
Mirror Systems, Social Understanding and Social Cognition
Alvin Goldman
The Parma group has recently suggested some accounts of the role of mirror mechanisms in social understanding. The various accounts are not equivalent, however. So which one do they really intend, and is it adequate? They also propose to unify all social cognition under the banner of mirror mechanisms or simulation mechanisms. Which kinds of mechanisms, exactly, do they mean, and which would be adequate for the job? I argue that neither motor mirror mechanisms nor mirror mechanisms in general are promising as a complete story. A broad notion of simulation, however, which includes mirror mechanisms as a special case, might well work.
Date of publication: 24 January 2005
Mirror neurons and action observation. Is simulation involved?
Gergely Csibra
I challenge the claim that the discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque brain supports a simulationist account of action understanding. Although the existence of such neurons does indeed suggest that the representation of executed and observed actions may share neural resources, simulation theories also assert that the understanding of observed actions is achieved *by virtue* of this shared representation. However, the evidence from single-cell studies suggests that mirror neurons receive highly interpreted ("well understood") input about observed actions, and lack enough specificity in observation-execution matching. These aspects of the findings are incompatible with a simulationist account of action understanding.
Date of publication: 4 January 2005
The Motor Theory of Social Cognition. A Critique.
Pierre Jacob
Marc Jeannerod
Recent advances in the cognitive neuroscience of action have considerably enlarged our understanding of human motor cognition. In particular, the activity of the mirror system first discovered in non-human primates seems to provide an observer with the understanding of a perceived action by means of a direct matching of the agent’s observed movements onto the observer’s own motor repertoire. Could not such a mechanism be the basis of the human ability to understand other minds and thus be the basis of human social cognition? Here we express our skepticism about the motor theory of social cognition.
Date of publication: 1 December 2004
Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron system and its role in interpersonal relations
Vittorio Gallese
Neuroscientific research has unveiled neural mechanisms mediating between the personal experiential knowledge we hold of our body and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal, body-related experiential knowledge enables our intentional attunement with others, which in turn constitutes a shared manifold of intersubjectivity. A direct form of "experiential understanding" is achieved by modeling the behavior of other individuals as intentional experience on the basis of the equivalence between what the others do and feel and what we do and feel. This parsimonious modeling mechanism is embodied simulation. The mirror neuron system is likely a neural correlate of this mechanism.
Date of publication: 15 November 2004
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