Social grasping: From mirroring to mentalizing

Becchio, Cristina; Cavallo, Andrea; Begliomini, Chiara; Sartori, Luisa; Feltrin, Giampietro; Castiello, Umberto

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.03.013

Cited by 107 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 61 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The pattern of responses may depend to some extent on the type of actions used: irrational, implausible or unusual actions generally produce greater responses in mentalizing areas (Liepelt, Von Cramon, & Brass, 2008;Marsh, Mullett, Ropar, & Hamilton, 2014), but de Lange and colleagues (2008) found that unusual actions produced greater response in mirror areas. Note however that even in that study, when participants were asked to judge intentions, greater response was found in mentalizing areas; and even actions which are not implausible tend to produce responses in mentalizing, as well as mirror, areas when participants are asked to judge intentions (Becchio et al, 2012;Ciaramidaro, Becchio, Colle, Bara, & Walter, 2014). Lieberman and colleagues suggest that mirror areas are involved in perceiving what is being done, and the way in which an action is performed (action perception; see section 3.2), whereas mentalizing areas are involved when inferring why an action is being performed (intention understanding; Spunt et al, 2010Spunt et al, , 2011Spunt & Lieberman, 2012).…”

Section: Brain Network Involved In Intention Understandingmentioning

confidence: 59%

Understanding intentions from actions: Direct perception, inference, and the roles of mirror and mentalizing systems

Catmur

2015

Consciousness and Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This review asks whether observers can obtain information about others' intentions from observation of their actions; and if so, whether this process is performed using direct perceptual or inferential processes (prominent examples of each being the intention understanding theory of mirror neuron function, and mentalizing accounts of intention understanding, respectively). I propose four conditions that should be fulfilled in order to support a direct perception account, and suggest that only two of these conditions are supported by the existing data. I then propose and review three further sources of evidence which have the potential to inform this debate, concluding that the data do not support the direct perception account. In particular, mirror neurons may be involved in lower--level processes of action perception, but there is no evidence to support their involvement in the type of higher--level intention understanding that is proposed by the direct perception account.

show abstract

Section: Brain Network Involved In Intention Understandingmentioning

confidence: 59%

Understanding intentions from actions: Direct perception, inference, and the roles of mirror and mentalizing systems

Catmur

2015

Consciousness and Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Not only watching dynamic displays of contingent actions performed by arbitrary shapes (Castelli, Happe, Frith & Frith, 2000), but also attending to complex social scenes that depict multiple agents (Kujala, Carlson, & Hari, 2012;Pierno, Becchio, Turella, Tubaldi & Castiello, 2008;Sinke, Sorger, Goebel & de Gelder, 2010;Spiers & Maguire, 2006;Wagner, Kelley & Heatherton, 2011) recruits the mentalizing network. Particularly, compared to observing a single individual's actions observing an interaction (Becchio et al, 2012;Iacoboni, Lieberman & Knowlton, 2004) and distinguishing point-light displays of communicative exchanges between individuals from displays of two agents acting independently also elicits activation in these regions (Centelles et al, 2011). Together these findings suggest that the mentalizing network serves perception of social interactions by supporting the observer in ascribing mental states to the observed agents, and in generating inferences about the nature of their interaction.…”

Section: Shared Intentionsmentioning

confidence: 75%

Neural correlates of observing joint actions with shared intentions

Eskenazi

Rueschemeyer

Lange

et al. 2015

Cortex

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Studies on the neural bases of action perception have largely focused on the perception of individual actions. Little is known about perception of joint actions where two or more individuals coordinate their actions based on a shared intention. In this fMRI study we asked whether observing situations where two individuals act on a shared intention elicits a different neural response than observing situations where individuals act on their independent parallel intentions. We compared the neural response to perceptually identical yet intentionally ambiguous actions observed in varying contexts. A dialog between two individuals conveyed either a shared intention or two independent parallel intentions. The dialogs were followed by an identical video clip where the two individuals performed certain actions. In one task condition participants tracked the intentions of the actors, in the other, they monitored moving colored dots placed on the same videos. We found that in the intention task versus the color task, observing joint actions based on shared intentions activated the temporal poles, precuneus, and the ventral striatum compared to observing interactions based on parallel intentions. Precuneus and the temporal poles are thought to support mental state reasoning, the latter with a more specific role in retrieving memories associated with social scripts. Activation in the ventral striatum, an area involved in reward processing, likely indicates a hedonistic response to observed shared intentional relations similarly to those experienced when personally sharing mental states with others.

show abstract

“…It is known that while observing the action unfolding, the manner in which an object is grasped may influence the decoding of others' intention (Becchio et al, 2012). In the current experiment, the different grasping conditions could imply different kinematics that could partly contribute to the MNs differential discharge.…”

Section: Effect Of Different Grasping Kinematicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mirror Neurons of Ventral Premotor Cortex Are Modulated by Social Cues Provided by Others' Gaze

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Mirror neurons (MNs) in the inferior parietal lobule and ventral premotor cortex (PMv) can code the intentions of other individuals using contextual cues. Gaze direction is an important social cue that can be used for understanding the meaning of actions made by other individuals. Here we addressed the issue of whether PMv MNs are influenced by the gaze direction of another individual. We recorded single-unit activity in macaque PMv while the monkey was observing an experimenter performing a grasping action and orienting his gaze either toward (congruent gaze condition) or away (incongruent gaze condition) from a target object. The results showed that one-half of the recorded MNs were modulated by the gaze direction of the human agent. These gaze-modulated neurons were evenly distributed between those preferring a gaze direction congruent with the direction where the grasping action was performed and the others that preferred an incongruent gaze. Whereas the presence of congruent responses is in line with the usual coupling of hand and gaze in both executed and observed actions, the incongruent responses can be explained by the long exposure of the monkeys to this condition. Our results reveal that the representation of observed actions in PMv is influenced by contextual information not only extracted from physical cues, but also from cues endowed with biological or social value.

show abstract

Social grasping: From mirroring to mentalizing

Cited by 107 publications

References 61 publications

Understanding intentions from actions: Direct perception, inference, and the roles of mirror and mentalizing systems

Understanding intentions from actions: Direct perception, inference, and the roles of mirror and mentalizing systems

Neural correlates of observing joint actions with shared intentions

Mirror Neurons of Ventral Premotor Cortex Are Modulated by Social Cues Provided by Others' Gaze

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About