Mirroring and Understanding

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter provides a review of the data collected over the last twenty years in support of the claim that the mirror mechanism can play a distinctive role in our understanding of other people’s actions, emotions, and vitality forms. This claim is undoubtedly the most debated of all the issues tackled in the book. For this reason, the chapter extensively discusses the main lines of evidence suggesting that the sensorimotor transformations induced by the mirror responses impact on how observed actions are perceptually judged. Similarly, it examines several studies, assessing whether and to what extent the recruitment of visceromotor representations plays a distinctive role in understanding other peoples’ emotions. The chapter closes with a review of the evidence of mirror responses for vitality form recognition.