Understanding the goals of others is fundamental for any kind of interpersonal interaction and collaboration. From a neurocognitive perspective, intention understanding has been proposed to depend on an involvement of the observer’s motor system in the prediction of the observed actions. An open question is if a similar understanding of the goal mediated by motor resonance can occur not only between humans, but also for humanoid robots. In this study we investigated whether goal-oriented robotic actions can induce motor resonance by (...) measuring the appearance of anticipatory gaze shifts to the goal during action observation. Our results indicate a similar implicit processing of humans’ and robots’ actions and propose to use anticipatory gaze behaviour as a tool for the evaluation of human-robot interactions. Keywords: Humanoid robot; motor resonance; anticipation; proactive gaze; action understanding. (shrink)

Sensory motor contingencies belong to a functionalistic framework. Functionalism does not explain why and how objective functional relations produce phenomenal experience. O'Regan & Noë (O&N) as well as other functionalists do not propose a new ontology that could support the first person subjective phenomenal side of experience.

Perruchet & Vinter's provocative article challenges a series of interesting issues, yet the concept of isomorphism is troublesome for a series of reasons: (1) isomorphism entails some sort of dualism; (2) isomorphism does not entail that a piece of the world is a representation; and (3) it is extremely difficult to provide an explanation about the nature of the relation of isomorphism.

In agreement with the target article, we would like to point out a few aspects related to embodiment which further support the position of biorobotics. We argue that, especially when complex systems are considered, modeling through a physical implementation can provide hints to comprehend the whole picture behind the specific set of experimental data.

This paper reports about our investigation on action understanding in the brain. We review recent results of the neurophysiology of the mirror system in the monkey. Based on these observations we propose a model of this brain system which is responsible for action recognition. The link between object affordances and action understanding is considered. To support our hypothesis we describe two experiments where some aspects of the model have been implemented. In the first experiment an action recognition system is trained (...) by using data recorded from human movements. In the second experiment, the model is partially implemented on a humanoid robot which learns to mimic simple actions performed by a human subject on different objects. These experiments show that motor information can have a significant role in action interpretation and that a mirror-like representation can be developed autonomously as a result of the interaction between an individual and the environment. (shrink)