The contribution of mirroring processes to
human mindreading
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 the brain of non-human primates, is currently being interpreted
as providing an observer with the understanding of a perceived
action by means of the motor simulation of the agent’s
observed movements. More recently, brain imagery in humans has
revealed that the same brain structure (namely, the human insula),
which is active when a person experiences such a basic emotion
as disgust caused by inhaling an odor, is also active when the
same person visually perceives the face of another person experiencing
disgust. These discoveries raise the prospects of a “mirroring”
theory of social cognition, according to which the basis of
human social cognition would be provided by these mirroring
(or resonating) brain mechanisms. Human social cognition includes
the ability to mindread, i.e., to represent other people’s
mental states, which is crucially involved in human verbal and
non-verbal communication. Prior to the recent discoveries of
mirroring phenomena by cognitive neuroscience, several cognitive
psychologists and philosophers of mind have offered a simulation
account of mindreading, according to which the fundamental cognitive
process lying at the basis of human mindreading would be the
ability to use one’s own cognitive resources in order
to simulate another’s mind. One important issue is whether
the various mirroring phenomena discovered by cognitive neuroscience
should be interpreted as the neural substrates that underlie
the use of simulation, which, according to simulation theorists,
constitutes the basis of the human mindreading system.
In the Fall 2004, Gloria Origgi and Dan Sperber organized a
web seminar entitled "The meaning of mirror neurons",
in which five distinct papers (by Vittorio Gallese, Pierre Jacob
and Marc Jeannerod, Gergely Csibra, Alvin Goldman and Susan
Hurley) were put on line and discussed for a period of three
months. The proceedings are available at: http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror
The workshop, which is a sequel to this web seminar, is intended
to maximize discussions among participants working in distinct
experimental and intellectual paradigms (e.g., cognitive neuroscience,
linguistic pragmatics and developmental psychology).