Mirroring as Pattern Completion Inferences within Situated Conceptualizations.

It is increasingly apparent that mirroring is an important social process in humans and other species. In humans, individuals mirror the actions, emotions, speech, attention, postures, etc. of other perceived individuals, at least neurally, and sometimes bodily and behaviorally. These mirroring processes play important roles in individual cognition and social interaction, including action understanding, action preparation, social contagion, and learning via imitation. The classic account of mirroring is that it results from mirror neurons, namely, neurons that have both motor and perceptual tunings. Mirror neurons not only become active when an action is performed, but also when it is perceived. Because these neurons become active during the perception of an action, they ground the perception in action simulation. An alternative account constitutes the thesis developed here: Mirroring is a special case of a basic cognitive process common across species, namely, Pattern Completion Inferences within Situated Conceptualizations (PCIwSC). According to PCIwSC, the brain is a situation processing architecture (Barsalou, 2003, 2009; Barsalou et al., 2003; Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2011; Yeh and Barsalou, 2006). In a given situation, multiple networks implement parallel processing streams that perceive and conceptualize various elements of the situation, including the setting, self, other agents, objects, actions, events, interoceptive states, and mental states. For example, the parahippocampal gyrus and parietal lobes process the spatial setting; regions of the cortical midline process self and others; the ventral stream processes objects; the motor system processes actions; and so forth. As individual elements of the current situation are perceived and conceptualized, higher-order configural conceptualizations in turn integrate these elemental conceptualizations into a coherent account of what is occurringmore globally across the situation. Together, all conceptualizations of the situation across the elemental and configural levels are assembled into a situated conceptualization (SC) that represents and interprets the situation. For example, when some friends wave at you from across the street, an SC of this event conceptualizes the setting as a street, the other people as your friends, their action as waving, and their mental state as friendly. At the configural level, these local conceptualizations are integrated into a coherent meaningful event, with your friends recognizing you, experiencing pleasure on seeing you, and greeting you. Once an SC is assembled in a situation, it becomes stored in memory. Because an SC is grounded in perceptual, interoceptive, and motor systems (Barsalou, 1999, 2008), it does not simply describe how the situation is conceptualized, but has the potential to implement relevant perceptions, bodily states, and actions via simulation within the respective modalities. Once an SC has been stored, it can be cued laterwhen a similar situation is encountered again, or when just part of the original situation is perceived. Once cued, the SC reinstates itself in the brain and body, producing grounded inferences about what is likely to happen in the situation (with reinstatement and inference both behaving dynamically; Barsalou, 2003). Thus, the SC constitutes a pattern in memory, which when reinstated, produces pattern completion inferences (PCIs). On seeing your friends across the street again, for example, the SC stored on the previous occasion might become active and simulate them waving to you as a prediction, further preparing you to wave back and feel positive affect.