Towards a unified framework for action and inference in social interactions

Abstract

Successful human social interactions depend upon the transmission of verbal and non-verbal signals from one individual to another. Non-verbal social communication is realized through our ability to read and understand information present in other people's actions. It has been proposed that employing the same motor programs we use to execute an action when observing the same action underlies this action understanding. The main prediction of this framework is that action perception should be strongly correlated with parameters of action execution. Here I present work that suggestions that the mechanisms of action perception and execution can be described by the same theoretical framework and that this enables us to test new theories of action perception and movement disorders. 

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