Corrado Sinigaglia

When witnessing someone else's action people often take advantage of the same motor cognition that is crucial to successfully perform that action themselves. But how deeply is motor cognition involved in understanding another's action? Can it be selectively modulated by either the agent's or the witness's being actually in the position to act? If this is the case, what does such modulation imply for one's making sense of others? The paper aims to tackle these issues by introducing and discussing a series of experimental studies showing how body and space may constrain one's own motor cognition reuse in understanding another's action. These findings, I shall argue, may shed new light on the mechanisms underlying the primary ways of identifying ourselves with other people and of being connected to them

The aim of our paper is to show that there is a sense of body that is enactive in nature and that enables to capture the most primitive sense of self. We will argue that the body is primarily given to us as source or power for action, i.e., as the variety of motor potentialities that define the horizon of the world in which we live, by populating it with things at hand to which we can be directed and with other bodies we can interact with. We will show that this sense of body as bodily self is, on the one hand, antecedent the distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership, and, on the other, it enables and refines such distinction, providing a conceptual framework for the coherent interpretation of a variety of behavioral and neuropsychological data. We will conclude by positing that the basic experiences we entertain of our selves as bodily selves are from the very beginning driven by our interactions with other bodies as they are underpinned by the mirror mechanism.