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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
sense of agency involved—exploring who is controlling whom.
Decety and colleagues [80] investigated using a PET the brain regions involved in
this process. The data showed the involvement of the inferior parietal cortex. In
particular, the right superior temporal gyrus was involved in visual analysis of the
other’s actions, while its homologous region in the left region was concerned with
analysis of the other’s actions in relation to actions performed by the self.
Meltzoff investigated, too, the earliest developmental roots of decoding the goals
and intentions of others [78]. His research showed that 18-month-old infants
distinguish between what an adult means to do and what he actually does. The infants
linked goals to human acts inferring the goal even when it was not attained. The
infants in these experiments were already exhibiting a fundamental aspect of our
adult framework: the acts of persons (but not the motions of objects) are based on
goals and intentions.
To explore the neural correlates of this ability, Chaminade, Decety and Meltzoff
[81] designed a functional neuroimaging experiment. The results show that, when
subjects imitated either the goal or the means to achieve it, overlapping activity was
found in the right dorsolateral prefrontal area and in the cerebellum. Moreover, on
one side, imitating the goal was associated with increased activity in the left premotor
cortex. On the other side, the imitation of the means was associated to specific
activity in the medial prefrontal cortex that is known to have a role in inferring
others’ intentions and is involved in mentalizing tasks.
This activation of the medial frontal region suggests that observing the means used
by an actor prompts the observer to construct/infer the goals whereto this human
agent is aiming [78]. This inference is consistent with the proposal by Moses [82] that
ToM is intimately bound with the advances of the children in executive functioning:
the skills and processes implicated in the monitoring and control of action.
3.4.4 The Covert Imitation Theory
Given the critical role of imitative abilities in the development of social skills, Wilson
and Knoblich [71, 83] introduced a different simulation theory based on imitation: the
Covert Imitation Theory. For these authors covert imitation functions as an automatic
action emulator, tracking the behavior of other subjects in real time to generate
perceptual predictions. As explained by Wilson and Knoblich:
“The various brain areas involved in translating perceived human movement into
corresponding motor programs collectively act as an emulator, internally simulating
the ongoing perceived movement. This emulator bypasses the delay of sensory
transmission to provide immediate information about the ongoing course of the
observed action as well as its probable immediate future. Such internal modeling
allows the perceiver to rapidly interpret the perceptual signal, to react quickly, to
disambiguate in situations of uncertainty, and to perceptually complete movements
that are not perceived in their entirety.” (p. 468).
This theory can be considered a social extension of the Situated Simulation and
Common Coding theories. Earlier we presented the construct of re-enactment as the
underlying mechanism behind them. However, this simple construct is not sufficient
alone to implement covert imitation. As suggested by Barsalou and colleagues [58]