Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 8, Issue 9, September 2004, Pages 396-403
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A unifying view of the basis of social cognition

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.07.002Get rights and content

In this article we provide a unifying neural hypothesis on how individuals understand the actions and emotions of others. Our main claim is that the fundamental mechanism at the basis of the experiential understanding of others’ actions is the activation of the mirror neuron system. A similar mechanism, but involving the activation of viscero-motor centers, underlies the experiential understanding of the emotions of others.

Section snippets

Action understanding: cognitive and motor mechanisms

The conventional conceptual approach for understanding actions performed by others is to consider seen actions in a similar way to all other visual stimuli. Let us imagine a boy throwing stones into a river: the visual system describes the boy, the stone, the river, the movement of his arm, and the flying of the stones. The integration of all these separate elements produces the neural input to a central conceptual system that will interpret and assign meaning to the visual representation (e.g.

Emotion understanding

So far, we have discussed the neural mechanism underlying action understanding. Does a similar mechanism mediate our understanding of the emotions of others? In the next sections we will show that a similar mechanism is also involved in our capacity to understand and experience the emotional states of others. We will focus on the emotion of disgust, for which rich empirical evidence has recently been acquired. We will discuss in particular the role of the insula that appears to play a

Towards a unifying neural hypothesis of the basis of social cognition

The human brain is endowed with structures that are active both during the first- and third-person experience of actions and emotions. When we witness someone else's action, we activate a network of parietal and premotor areas that is also active while we perform similar actions. When we witness the disgusted facial expressions of someone else, we activate that part of our insula that is also active when we experience disgust. Thus, the understanding of basic aspects of social cognition depends

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Andy Calder for generously providing the structural MR image of patient NK. This work was supported by MIUR, by the European Science Foundation EUROCORES program ‘The Origin of Man, Language and Languages’, and by the European grant QLRT-2001–00746 (MIRROR). All authors equally contributed to this paper.

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