Social Perception: Understanding Other People’s Intentions and Emotions through their Actions

Humans are adapted to living in social groups with complex patterns of social interactions. Understanding the meaning of other people’s behavior is an essential aspect of human communication, and a large amount of our daily life is spent watching and interpreting the actions of others (Barresi & Moore, 1996). The neural mechanism underlying our ability to represent others’ goals by the mere observation of their motor actions has been the target of considerable research. Behavioral experiments had suggested that the system for generating and representing actions is also used in the perception of actions (Knoblich & Prinz, 2001). This approach was strengthened by the discovery of “mirror” neurons in the macaque monkey brain, a class of neurons found in the parietal and the premotor cortex. They were seen to discharge not only when the monkey performed an action but also when the monkey was observing an experimenter or another monkey performing the same action (di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, & Rizzolatti, 1992). Similarly, neuroimaging studies in humans have revealed parietal (PAR) and premotor (PM) activations both during execution and action observation, suggesting that action observation automatically triggers action representations (Grèzes, Armony, Rowe, & Passingham, 2003). The superior temporal sulcus (STS), involved in the perception of biological movements and in the observation of actions made by different body parts, was also active (Allison, Puce, & McCarthy, 2000). Finally, the correspondence between perception and action was shown to be somatotopically J