Motor cognition takes into account the preparation and production of actions, as well as the processes involved in recognizing, predicting, mimicking, and understanding the behavior of other people.
This evidence has been marshaled in the "common coding theory" put forward by Wolfgang Prinz and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.
Its core assumption is that actions are coded in terms of the perceivable effects (i.e., the distal perceptual events) they should generate.
[4] Performing a movement leaves behind a bidirectional association between the motor pattern it has generated and the sensory effects that it produces.
[6] An example of such coupling is the ease with which people can engage in speech repetition when asked to shadow words heard in earphones.
A variety of functional neuroimaging studies, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography, and magnetoencephalography have demonstrated that a motor resonance mechanism in the premotor and posterior parietal cortices occurs when participants observe or produce goal-directed actions.
[13] There is an impressive number of behavioral and neurophysiological studies demonstrating that perception and action have a common neuronal coding and that this leads to shared representations between self and others, which can lead to host of phenomena such as emotional contagion, empathy, social facilitation, and understanding others minds.
[19][20] To understand the relationship between cognition and action, Cherie L. Gerstadt, Yoon Joo Hong, and Adele Diamond of the University of Pennsylvania carried out a Stroop like day-night test [21] on children between the age of 3
They tested one hundred and sixty children on a task that requires inhibitory control of action plus learning and remembering two rules.
They concluded that the requirement to learn and remember two rules is not in itself sufficient to account for the poor performance of the younger children.
[25] A related study showed that motor experts use similar processes for the mental rotation of body parts and polygons, whereas non-experts treated these stimuli differently.
[29][30] fMRI studies in humans have been gathering evidence that mirror neurons are responsible for the "Physical to self-mapping"[31] In studies where participants had to identify their own face, right hemispheric mirror neurons activated indicating responsibility for the ability of one to represent one’s own physical actions/states.
Participants observed a video of an action being performed under a high or low cognitive load.
Shannon Spaulding (2013) argues that the neuroscientists who offer up mirror neurons as a physiological answer to social cognition are misinterpreting their results and not using the correct philosophical definitions of goal and intention.