Seeing minds: A neurophilosophical investigation of the role of perception-action coupling in social perception

Abstract

This paper proposes an empirical hypothesis that in some cases of social interaction we have an immediate perceptual access to others' minds in the perception of their embodied intentionality. Our point of departure is the phenomenological insight that there is an experiential difference in the perception of embodied intentionality and the perception of non-intentionality. The other's embodied intentionality is perceptually given in a way that is different from the givenness of non-intentionality. We claim that the phenomenological difference in the perception of embodied intentionality and non-intentionality translates into an account of how, in some cases of social cognition, we perceive mental properties in the perception of embodied intentionality. The hypothesis derives support from a host of recent empirical studies in social neuroscience which demonstrate the importance of embodied engagements in understanding other minds. These studies reveal that embodied intersubjective interaction often builds on our ability to understand other minds in an immediate perceptual way not adequately investigated by theory-theory (TT) and simulation theories (ST) of mind-reading. We argue that there is a genuine, nontrivial difference in the informational content of the perception of embodied intentionality and the perception of non-intentionality which leads to a further difference in the way information is processed in the case of perception of embodied intentionality as opposed to the perception of non-intentionality. The full significance of such difference is appreciated only within an account of perception which views perception and action as tightly coupled. Thus, we propose an “action-oriented account of social perception” to develop a neurophilosophical account of the perceptual knowledge of other minds.

Keywords:

• Social cognition
• Perception
• Action
• Social neuroscience
• Social gaze
• Action control

Acknowledgments

The empirical research described in this paper was supported by the Koeln Fortune Program, Medical Faculty, University of Cologne, and the Volkswagen Foundation via grants to the second author. The first author would like to thank the participants at a Tuesday Seminar at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, for many helpful comments on the paper.

Notes

¹By the term “embodied intentionality” in this paper, we shall refer to the kind of intentionality that characterizes our skillful bodily coping with the world. Much contemporary discussion of embodied intentionality is inspired by Merleau-Ponty's (2002) idea of “motor intentionality.” He writes, “my body appears to me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task” (p. 114). Again, “the recognition of something between movement as a third person process and thought as a representation of movement—something which is an anticipation of, or arrival at, the objective and is ensured by the body itself as a motor power, a “motor project”…a “motor intentionality” (pp. 126–127). We shall use the term “embodied intentionality” to include expressive behaviors and goal-directed bodily activities.

²Some leading simulationist views, e.g., Goldman (2006), claim to be hybrid theories which combine elements of simulation and theorizing to explain “high-level mind-reading” involving in some cases the ascription of propositional attitudes.

³We borrow the term from Tomasello (2006) and Tomasello and Carpenter (2007), although our usage may not correspond to that of these authors. We are noncommittal with regard to these authors' usage of “shared intentionality” to signify that “human beings, and only human beings, are biologically adapted for participating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordinated action plans” (Tomasello & Carpenter, 2007, p. 676), and we treat the issue of a uniquely human ability as an open empirical question.

⁴From an ontogenetic point of view, the presence of such an openness to another subject of experience may well be the function of an “innate intersubjectivity” described as “.the infant is born with awareness specifically receptive to subjective states in other persons” (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001, p. 4).

⁵For some in-depth conceptual and empirical discussions of self–other relation(s) in the context of actions in general, see, e.g., the meta-analysis offered by Grèzes and Decety (2001) of various aspects of action generation, action verbalization, and action perception; Decety and Sommerville (2003) on the notion of shared representation between self and other; Jeannerod and Pacherie (2004) on the problem of self-identification in action in general; and Sebanz and Knoblich (2009) on how people coordinate their actions in real time.

⁶For example, Perrett et al. (1989) state, “The coding of interrelationships that is inherent in goal-centred descriptions provides a framework through which the visual system can achieve a rich understanding of the world which embodies causation and intentionality” (p. 110).