ABSTRACT
Making sense of another individual’s behavior is fundamental for a successful life in a complex social world. Several accounts of social understanding have been proposed to explain the neural and cognitive mechanisms that support this principal human ability. One of the main questions regarding the mechanisms of social understanding is whether the representations and processes that underlie human social cognition are embodied or conceptual/symbolic in nature (Mahon & Caramazza, 2008, Toni, de Lange, Noordzij & Hagoort, 2008, Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2010; Ondobaka & Bekkering, 2013). Related questions have been on the research agenda of psychologists and cognitive scientists interested in the brain, cognition and behavior for many decades. In this chapter we discuss the current views of social embodiment and consider embodied social understanding from the perspective of hierarchical predictive processing.
