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Motor abstraction: a neuroscientific account of how action goals and intentions are mapped and understood

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Abstract

Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience shed light on the existence of a common neural mechanism that could account for action and intention to understand abilities in humans and non-human primates. Empirical evidence on the neural underpinnings of action goals and on their ontogeny and phylogeny is introduced and discussed. It is proposed that the properties of the mirror neuron system and the functional mechanism describing them, embodied simulation, enabled pre-linguistic forms of action and intention understanding. Basic aspects of social cognition appear to be primarily based on the motor cognition that underpins one’s own capacity to act, here defined as motor abstraction. On the basis of this new account of the motor system, it is proposed that intersubjectivity is the best conceived of as intercorporeity.

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Notes

  1. In the present chapter the notion of representation is used very differently from its standard meaning in classic cognitive science and analytic philosophy. It refers to a particular type of content, generated by the relations that our situated and inter-acting brain–body system instantiates with the world of others. Such content is pre-linguistic and pre-theoretical, but nevertheless has attributes normally and uniquely attributed to conceptual content. The pre-linguistic status of motor content does not preclude access to consciousness.

  2. Recent evidence actually call into question the mind reading specificity of these cortical areas (see Bird et al., 2005; Mitchell, 2008)

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Ministero Italiano dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR) and by the EU grant NESTCOM and by the EU Marie Curie—Research Training Network 035975 “DISCOS—Disorders and coherence of the embodied self.”

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Gallese, V. Motor abstraction: a neuroscientific account of how action goals and intentions are mapped and understood. Psychological Research 73, 486–498 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-009-0232-4

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