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G. Riva, M.T. Anguera, B.K. Wiederhold and F. Mantovani (Eds.)
From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the
Ultimate Communicative Experience. Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli
IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006, (c) All rights reserved - http://www.emergingcommunication.com
neurons (convergence zones) identify and capture the patterns (the apple is red, has a
catching size, etc.); later the convergence zone fire to partially reactivate the earlier
sensory representation (I want to take a different apple); finally this representation
reactivate a pattern of activation in feature maps similar, but not identical, to the
original one (re-enactment) allowing the subject to predict the action results.
The final outcome of this vision is the idea of a spatial-temporal framework of
virtual objects directly present to the subject: an inner world simulation in the brain.
As described by Barsalou [59]:
“In representing a concept, it is as people were being there with one of its instances.
Rather than representing a concept in detached isolated manner, people construct a
multimodal simulation of themselves interacting with an instance of the concept. To
represent the concept they prepare for situated action with one of its instances.” (p.
9).
3.4 The “Being-in-the-world-with” for Social and Cognitive Neuroscience
In the picture described by Heidegger the second ontological features of the being is
“being-with”, the being is always a “being with others”. In this paragraph we will
discuss this assumption in the view of the results coming from social and cognitive
neuroscience.
3.4.1 Mirror Neurons in Social Neuroscience
Recently, research in the neurosciences has focused its attention to understand social
cognition. With the term “social cognition” is usually defined the information-
processing system that enables us to engage in social behavior. Specifically, social
neuroscience is interested to understand whether the processes that give rise to social
cognition are a subset of more general cognitive processes or whether specific social-
cognitive processes exist [60].
In responding to this question, social neuroscience has three assumptions [61]:
- the mechanisms underlying mind and behavior will not be fully explicable by a
biological or a social approach alone;
- a multi-level integrative analysis may be required;
- a common scientific language, grounded in the structure and function of the
brain, can contribute to this endpoint.
A significant step towards this common language comes from the Common Coding
and Situated Simulation theories. Specifically, a consequence of the link between
perception and action is that observing actions or action effects produced by another
individual may also activate a representation of one’s own actions.
This assumption, too, has been recently confirmed from the outcome of single-
neuron recordings in the premotor cortex of behaving monkeys [48, 49]. Specifically,
Rizzolatti and colleagues discovered that a functional cluster of premotor neurons
(F5c-PF) contains “mirror neurons”, a class of neurons that are activated both during
the execution of purposeful, goal-related hand actions, and during the observation of
similar actions performed by another individual [48, 62, 63]. Different brain-imaging
experiments demonstrated in humans the existence of a mirror system in the premotor