From One's Own Actions to the Actions of Others

Representing others' actions: just like one's own?

Previous research has shown that observing others' actions can affect individual performance of the same actions. In the present study, we developed a new paradigm to investigate whether and how complementary actions at the disposal of another agent are represented and influence one's own actions. A spatial compatibility task was distributed among two people so that each participant took care o...

Learning to understand others' actions

Despite nearly two decades of research on mirror neurons, there is still much debate about what they do. The most enduring hypothesis is that they enable 'action understanding'. However, recent critical reviews have failed to find compelling evidence in favour of this view. Instead, these authors argue that mirror neurons are produced by associative learning and therefore that they cannot contr...

Timed process calculi: from durationless actions to durational ones

Several timed process calculi have been proposed in the literature, which mainly differ for the way in which delays are represented. In particular, a distinction is made between integrated-time calculi, in which actions are durational, and orthogonal-time calculi, in which actions are instantaneous and delays are expressed separately. To reconcile the two approaches, in a previous work an encod...

Learning from their own actions: the unique effect of producing actions on infants' action understanding.

Prior research suggests that infants' action production affects their action understanding, but little is known about the aspects of motor experience that render these effects. In Study 1, the relative contributions of self-produced (n = 30) and observational (n = 30) action experience on 3-month-old infants' action understanding was assessed using a visual habituation paradigm. In Study 2, gen...

Liability for the actions of others.