Motor cognition
Encyclopedia
The concept of motor cognition grasps the notion that cognition
is embodied in action, and that the motor system
participates in what is usually considered as mental processing, including those involved in social interaction. The fundamental unit of the motor cognition paradigm is action, defined as the movements produced to satisfy an intention towards a specific motor goal
, or in reaction to a meaningful event in the physical and social environments. Motor cognition takes into account the preparation and production of actions, as well as the processes involved in recognizing, predicting, mimicking and understanding the behavior of other people. This paradigm has received a great deal of attention and empirical support in recents years from a variety of research domains including developmental psychology
, cognitive neuroscience
, and social psychology
.
and more recently, American neurophysiologist and Nobel prize winner Roger Sperry. Sperry argued that the perception–action cycle is the fundamental logic of the nervous system
. Perception and action processes are functionally intertwined: perception
is a means to action and action is a means to perception. Indeed, the vertebrate brain has evolved for governing motor activity with the basic function to transform sensory patterns into patterns of motor coordination.
More recently, there is growing empirical evidence from cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, as well as social psychology which demonstrates that perception and action share common computational codes and underlying neural architectures. This evidence has been marshaled in the "common coding theory
" put forward by Wolfgang Prinz
and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute. This theory claims parity between perception and action. Its core assumption is that actions are coded in terms of the perceivable effects (i.e., the distal perceptual events) they should generate. Performing a movement
leaves behind a bidirectional association between the motor pattern it has generated by and the sensory effects that it produces. Such an association can then be used backwards to retrieve a movement by anticipating its effects. These perception/action codes are also accessible during action observation.Other authors suggest a new notion of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origin of action understanding that utilizes the motor system; motor cognition hypothesis. This states that motor cognition provides both human and nonhuman primates with a direct, prereflexive understanding of biological actions that match their own action catalog.
The discovery of mirror neurons in the ventral premotor and parietal cortices of the macaque monkey that fire both when it carries out a goal-directed action and when it observes the same action performed by another individual provides neurophysiological evidence for a direct matching between action perception and action production. An example of such coupling is the ease with which people can engage in speech repetition
when asked to shadow
words heard in earphones.
In humans, common neural activation during action observation and execution has been well documented. A variety of functional neuroimaging
studies, using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), positron emission tomography, and magnetoencephalography
have demonstrated that a motor resonance mechanism in the premotor and posterior parietal cortices occurs when participants observe or produce goal directed actions. Such a motor resonance system seems to be hard wired, or at least functional very early in life.
, empathy
, social facilitation, and understanding others minds.
between perception and action is that watching an action performed by another person facilitates the later reproduction of that action in the observer. For instance, in one study, participants executed arm movements while observing either a robot or another human producing the same or qualitatively different arm movements. The results show that observing another human make incongruent movements interferes with movement execution but observing a robotic arm making incongruent movements does not.
, first described by Robert Zajonc
, which accounts for the demonstration that the presence of other people can affect individual performance. A number of studies have demonstrated that watching facial expression of emotions prompts the observer to resonate with the state of another individual, with the observer activating the motor representations and associated autonomic and somatic responses that stem from the observed target.
mechanism). Some authors have suggested that the shared representations network that stems from the perception-action matching mechanism may support mental state attribution via covert (i.e., non conscious) mental simulation. In contrast, some other scholars have argued that the mirror system and the theory of mind system are two distinct processes and it’s likely that the former cannot account for mental state understanding.
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
is embodied in action, and that the motor system
Motor system
The motor system is the part of the central nervous system that is involved with movement. It consists of the pyramidal and extrapyramidal system....
participates in what is usually considered as mental processing, including those involved in social interaction. The fundamental unit of the motor cognition paradigm is action, defined as the movements produced to satisfy an intention towards a specific motor goal
Motor goal
A motor goal is a neurally planned motor outcome that is used to organize motor control.Motor goals are experimentally shown to exist since planned movements can when disrupted adjust to achieve their planned outcome...
, or in reaction to a meaningful event in the physical and social environments. Motor cognition takes into account the preparation and production of actions, as well as the processes involved in recognizing, predicting, mimicking and understanding the behavior of other people. This paradigm has received a great deal of attention and empirical support in recents years from a variety of research domains including developmental psychology
Developmental psychology
Developmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes, emotional changes, and perception changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to...
, cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
, and social psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
.
Perception-action coupling
The idea of a continuity between the different aspects of motor cognition is not new. In fact, this idea can be traced to the work of the American psychologist William JamesWilliam James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
and more recently, American neurophysiologist and Nobel prize winner Roger Sperry. Sperry argued that the perception–action cycle is the fundamental logic of the nervous system
Nervous system
The nervous system is an organ system containing a network of specialized cells called neurons that coordinate the actions of an animal and transmit signals between different parts of its body. In most animals the nervous system consists of two parts, central and peripheral. The central nervous...
. Perception and action processes are functionally intertwined: perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
is a means to action and action is a means to perception. Indeed, the vertebrate brain has evolved for governing motor activity with the basic function to transform sensory patterns into patterns of motor coordination.
More recently, there is growing empirical evidence from cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, as well as social psychology which demonstrates that perception and action share common computational codes and underlying neural architectures. This evidence has been marshaled in the "common coding theory
Common coding theory
Common coding theory is a cognitive psychology theory describing how perceptual representations and motor representations are linked. The theory claims that there is a shared representation for both perception and action...
" put forward by Wolfgang Prinz
Wolfgang Prinz
Wolfgang Prinz is director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and an internationally recognized expert in experimental psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind...
and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute. This theory claims parity between perception and action. Its core assumption is that actions are coded in terms of the perceivable effects (i.e., the distal perceptual events) they should generate. Performing a movement
Motion (physics)
In physics, motion is a change in position of an object with respect to time. Change in action is the result of an unbalanced force. Motion is typically described in terms of velocity, acceleration, displacement and time . An object's velocity cannot change unless it is acted upon by a force, as...
leaves behind a bidirectional association between the motor pattern it has generated by and the sensory effects that it produces. Such an association can then be used backwards to retrieve a movement by anticipating its effects. These perception/action codes are also accessible during action observation.Other authors suggest a new notion of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origin of action understanding that utilizes the motor system; motor cognition hypothesis. This states that motor cognition provides both human and nonhuman primates with a direct, prereflexive understanding of biological actions that match their own action catalog.
The discovery of mirror neurons in the ventral premotor and parietal cortices of the macaque monkey that fire both when it carries out a goal-directed action and when it observes the same action performed by another individual provides neurophysiological evidence for a direct matching between action perception and action production. An example of such coupling is the ease with which people can engage in speech repetition
Speech repetition
thumb|250px|right|[[Children]] copy with their own [[mouth]]s the words spoken by the mouths of those around them. This enables them to learn the [[pronunciation]] of words not already in their [[vocabulary]]....
when asked to shadow
Speech shadowing
Speech shadowing is an experimental technique in which subjects repeat speech immediately after hearing it . The reaction time between hearing a word and pronouncing it can be as short as 254 ms or even 150 ms. This is only the delay duration of a speech syllable...
words heard in earphones.
In humans, common neural activation during action observation and execution has been well documented. A variety of functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions...
studies, using functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a type of specialized MRI scan used to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging...
(fMRI), positron emission tomography, and magnetoencephalography
Magnetoencephalography
Magnetoencephalography is a technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain, using arrays of SQUIDs...
have demonstrated that a motor resonance mechanism in the premotor and posterior parietal cortices occurs when participants observe or produce goal directed actions. Such a motor resonance system seems to be hard wired, or at least functional very early in life.
Shared representations between other and self
The common coding theory also states that perception of an action should activate action representations to the degree that the perceived and the represented action are similar. As such, these representations may be shared between individuals. Indeed, the meaning of a given object, action, or social situation may be common to several people and activate corresponding distributed patterns of neural activity in their respective brains. There is an impressive number of behavioral and neurophysiological studies demonstrating that perception and action have a common neuronal coding and that this leads to shared representations between self and others, which can lead to host of phenomena such as emotional contagionEmotional contagion
Emotional contagion is the tendency to catch and feel emotions that are similar to and influenced by those of others. One view developed by John Cacioppo of the underlying mechanism is that it represents a tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures,...
, empathy
Empathy
Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...
, social facilitation, and understanding others minds.
Motor priming
One consequence of the functional equivalenceEquivalence
Equivalence or equivalent may refer to:*In chemistry:**Equivalent **Equivalence point**Equivalent weight*In computing:**Turing equivalence *In ethics:**Moral equivalence*In history:...
between perception and action is that watching an action performed by another person facilitates the later reproduction of that action in the observer. For instance, in one study, participants executed arm movements while observing either a robot or another human producing the same or qualitatively different arm movements. The results show that observing another human make incongruent movements interferes with movement execution but observing a robotic arm making incongruent movements does not.
Social facilitation
The fact that the observation of action can prime a similar response in the observer, and that the degree to which the observed action facilitates a similar response in the observer cast some light into the phenomenon called social facilitationSocial facilitation
Social facilitation is the tendency for people to do better on simple tasks when in the presence of other people. This implies that whenever people are being watched by others, they will do well on things that they are already good at doing...
, first described by Robert Zajonc
Robert Zajonc
Robert Bolesław Zajonc was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes.-Mere Exposure Effect:...
, which accounts for the demonstration that the presence of other people can affect individual performance. A number of studies have demonstrated that watching facial expression of emotions prompts the observer to resonate with the state of another individual, with the observer activating the motor representations and associated autonomic and somatic responses that stem from the observed target.
Motor cognition and mental state understanding
Humans have a tendency to interpret the actions of others with respect to underlying mental states. One important question is whether the perception-action matching mechanism and its product, shared motor representations, can account (or to what extent it does) for the attribution of mental states to others (often dubbed theory of mindTheory of mind
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own...
mechanism). Some authors have suggested that the shared representations network that stems from the perception-action matching mechanism may support mental state attribution via covert (i.e., non conscious) mental simulation. In contrast, some other scholars have argued that the mirror system and the theory of mind system are two distinct processes and it’s likely that the former cannot account for mental state understanding.
Selected works
- Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J., & Rapson, R. (1994). "Emotional Contagion." New York: Cambridge Press.
- Jeannerod, M. (1997). "The cognitive neuroscience of action." Wiley-Blackwell.
- Morsella, E., Bargh, J.A., & Gollwitzer, P.M. (Eds.) (2009). Oxford Handbook of Human Action. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Markman, K.D., Klein, W.M.P. & J.A. Suhr (Eds.), (2008). "The Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation." New York: Psychology Press.
- Thelen, E. (1995). "Motor development: A new synthesis." American Psychologist, 50, 79-95.
See also
- Common coding theoryCommon coding theoryCommon coding theory is a cognitive psychology theory describing how perceptual representations and motor representations are linked. The theory claims that there is a shared representation for both perception and action...
- EmpathyEmpathyEmpathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...
- Motor imageryMotor imageryMotor imagery is a mental process by which an individual rehearses or simulates a given action. It is widely used in sport training , neurological rehabilitation, and has also been employed as a research paradigm in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology to investigate the content and the...
- Social cognitionSocial cognitionSocial cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, in the brain, of information relating to conspecifics, or members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the...
- Social neuroscienceSocial neuroscienceSocial neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior. Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather...
- Theory of mindTheory of mindTheory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own...