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 mind 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.
Read more about this topic: Motor Cognition
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