The representational space of observed actions

The multidimensional representational space of observed socio-affective touch experiences

Observed touch interactions provide useful information on how others communicate with the external world. Previous studies revealed shared neural circuits between the direct experience and the passive observation of simple touch, such as being stroked/slapped. Here, we investigate the complexity of the neural representations underlying the understanding of others' socio-affective touch interact...

Observed actions affect body-specific associations between space and valence.

Right-handers tend to associate "good" with the right side of space and "bad" with the left. This implicit association appears to arise from the way people perform actions, more or less fluently, with their right and left hands. Here we tested whether observing manual actions performed with greater or lesser fluency can affect observers' space-valence associations. In two experiments, we assign...

Motor ontology: the representational reality of goals, actions and selves

The representational dynamics of the brain is a subsymbolic process, and it has to be conceived as an “agent-free” type of dynamical self-organization. However, in generating a coherent internal world-model, the brain decomposes target space in a certain way. In doing so, it defines an “ontology”: to have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a re...

Motor and representational framing of space

Reasoning about Partially Observed Actions

Partially observed actions are observations of action executions in which we are uncertain about the identity of objects, agents, or locations involved in the actions (e.g., we know that actionmove(?o, ?x, ?y) occurred, but do not know ?o, ?y). Observed-Action Reasoning is the problem of reasoning about the world state after a sequence of partial observations of actions and states. In this pape...