|
The
Principle of Mirroring: Promises and Limitations A principle of mirroring has been identified in several cognitive domains,
including action and emotion. In these domains, brain activation for the self
and brain activation for other people overlaps to some extent, reflecting common cognitive and neural processing for self and other. The existence of
mirroring has been hailed as a great leap forward in our understanding of social interaction, including the uniquely human ability to empathise and to
comprehend beliefs, desires, goals and intentions. However, I argue that identifying a principle of mirroring is only the start of a scientific
exploration of higher level cognitive functions. The principle of mirroring
does not in itself reveal how we are able to match the intentions and beliefs
of self and other in a common framework. In this talk, I will examine what
mirroring can and cannot tell us about social cognition. I will present data demonstrating that neuronal populations in
different brain regions represent the actions of other people at different levels, from simple
grasps to more abstract intentions. These results allow us to fractionate the
neural systems for action understanding into their component parts and to consider how information is processed within this system. The value of this
approach will be demonstrated by a second study of children with autism.
I show that, contrary to recent predictions, children with autism do not have
difficulties with goal imitation or gesture understanding. These data cannot
be accounted for by a global breakdown of the principle of mirroring in autism,
but can be understood within the fractionated model. Finally, I will describe
a new model of goal and intention representation which demonstrates a way to
use the principle of mirroring to draw conclusions about abstract social cognitive processes. |