Motor Cognition - Shared Representations Between Other and Self

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 contagion, empathy, social facilitation, and understanding others minds.