Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
The ability to recognise and to distinguish ourselves from other persons is an essential component of our social behaviour. We normally take it for granted that our body builds an entity independent from other bodies in the outside world and we can easily attribute body states and actions to the self or to another agent. It is the private nature of our bodily sensations which determines a (basic) sense of self. From a scientific point of view however, the ability to recognize one’s own body and actions as such appears problematic and not-well understood. In particular the recent discovery of shared representations of actions, based on mirror neurons, suggests that action attribution is a key computational problem for the sensorimotor system of the brain. The properties of mirror neurons suggest that both self-generated and observed actions activate overlapping neural networks, thus implying a shared representation of self and other at the basic sensorimotor level. How can we attribute actions to the respective agent and more generally, how can we distinguish self and other, given that our brain represents other’s actions in the same way as it represents one’s own? Moreover, if action representations are indeed shared we should frequently make errors in assigning actions to the respective agent. The present paper will give an overview on recent empirical findings showing when misattribution of actions and bodies occur. Furthermore, the possible mechanisms shall be examined that allow us in the end to successfully recognize one’s own actions and ourselves in general.
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