From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the Ultimate Communicative Experience. Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli



61

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

and parietal areas - similar to that observed in monkeys - matching action observation
and execution [64-66].

Further, a recent study showed that a similar process happens with emotions [67].
In the experiment, a group of male subjects observed video clips showing the
emotional facial expression of disgust. Both observing such faces, and feeling
disgust, activated the same sites in the anterior insula and to a lesser extent in the
anterior cingulate cortex.

Finally, the results of three studies by Keyser and colleagues [68] showed that the
first-person subjective experience of being touched on one’s body activates the same
neural networks in the secondary somatosensory cortices activated by observing the
body of someone else being touched.

3.4.2 Embodied Simulation

The general framework, outlined by the above results, suggests the sensory-motor
integration supported by the mirror matching system instantiates simulations of
transitive actions utilized not only to generate and control goal-related behaviors, but
also to map the goals and purposes of others’ actions, by means of their simulation
[25, 52, 56, 69].

This process, as predicted by Heidegger, establishes a direct link between the being
and the other beings, in that both are mapped in a neutral fashion: the observer uses
her/his own resources to directly experience the world of the other by means of an
unconscious process of motor simulation. To summarize,
action observation
constitutes a form of embodied simulation of action [69]
. As suggested by Gallese
[52]:

“First, the same neural structures modeling the functions of our body in the world
also contribute to our awareness of our lived body in the world and of the objects
that the world contains. Embodied simulation constitutes the functional mechanism at
the basis of this dual property of the same neural circιιils... Second, there are neural
mechanisms mediating between the multi level personal background experience we
entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about
others. Such personal body-related experience enables us to understand the actions
performed by others, and to directly decode the emotions and sensations they
experience.” (p. 42).

However, the Embodied Simulation approach, at least in this broad formulation raised
a critical concern (for a detailed description see the full text of the interdisciplinary
conference “
What do mirror neurons means”, available online at the address:
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1): the activity of mirror neurons alone
is not enough to provide the richness required for representing a subject’s social
intention. Jacob and Jeannerod [70] clearly detailed this point:

“The firing of MNs is a social cognitive process only in a very weak sense. When
MNs fire in the brain of a monkey during action execution, the discharge is not a
social cognitive process at all. When MNs fire in the brain of a monkey watching
another grasp a fruit, the discharge is a weakly social process: the two monkeys are
not involved in any kind of non-verbal intentional communication. The agent intends
to grasp a fruit, not to impart some information to his conspecific. Nor does the



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