Beyond mirror neurons: the social affordance hypothesis

Thirty years ago, a new class of cells that a few years later were named mirror neurons was discovered in the ventral premotor cortex of the macaque. Pioneering, qualitative studies of their functional properties emphasized their specificity for the encoding of goal-directed actions of both self and others and the lack of response to visually presented objects, pantomimed actions, non-biological movement of tools or other solid objects, concluding that they could play a crucial role in recognizing - or “understanding” - other’s observed actions. In this talk, I will show that recent data support instead a more complex and articulated perspective, in which mirror neurons are just “the tip of an iceberg” constituted by a broad set of social remapping phenomena, which may have evolved primarily to select and prepare potential motor actions afforded by others’ observed behaviors.