ABSTRACT
The discovery of “mirror neurons” in the mid-1990s (Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, 1996; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996) was greeted with considerable excitement by many in the field of the psychology of social understanding because these specialized cells appeared to provide a neural substrate for how humans, and their close phylogenetic relatives are able to make sense of the goal-directed actions of others. The existence of mirror neurons appealed particularly to a subset of developmentalists who had been arguing that the development of specifically human forms of social understanding, including the understanding of intentionality and children’s “theory of mind,” must depend upon the capacity to integrate information derived from the observation of others’ actions and the execution of the self’s actions. This is because human social understanding recognizes the similarity of both self and others as intentional and mental agents even though the information available about self and others is radically different and in some ways incommensurable. In a paper reviewing theories of the origins of social understanding in infancy, Moore (1996) termed such accounts “matching” theories. Matching theories are those theories that assign a key developmental role to infants’ participation in social interactive situations in which the actions of self and other are matched. In such situations, infants will be provided with information about others’ actions and information about their own actions so that information processing mechanisms such as intermodal integration can serve to generate amodal representations of those actions, representations that can be applied equivalently to the observation of both others’ and one’s own action.
