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This article addresses basic aspects of social cognition focusing on the pivotal role played by the lived body in the constitution of our experience of others. It is suggested that before studying intersubjectivity we should better qualify the notion of the self. A minimal notion of the self, the bodily self, defined in terms of its motor potentialities, is proposed. The discovery of mirror mechanisms for action, emotions and sensations led to the proposal of an embodied approach to intersubjectivity—embodied simulation (ES) theory. ES and the related notion of neural reuse provide a new empirically based perspective on intersubjectivity, viewed first and foremost as intercorporeality. ES challenges the notion that folk psychology is the sole account of interpersonal understanding. ES is discussed within a second-person perspective on mindreading.

The automatic translation of folk psychology into newly formed brain modules specifically dedicated to mind-reading and other social cognitive abilities should be carefully scrutinized. Searching for the brain location of intentions, beliefs and desires-as such-might not be the best epistemic strategy to disclose what social cognition really is. The results of neurocognitive research suggest that in the brain of primates, mirror neurons, and more generally the premotor system, play a major role in several aspects of social cognition, from action and intention understanding to language processing. This evidence is presented and discussed within the theoretical frame of an embodied simulation account of social cognition. Embodied simulation and the mirror neuron system underpinning it provide the means to share communicative intentions, meaning and reference, thus granting the parity requirements of social communication.

It has been proposed that the capacity to code the 'like me' analogy between self and others constitutes a basic prerequisite and a starting point for social cognition. It is by means of this self/other equivalence that meaningful social bonds can be established, that we can recognize others as similar to us, and that imitation can take place. In this article I discuss recent neurophysiological and brain imaging data on monkeys and humans, showing that the 'like me' analogy may rest upon a series of 'mirror-matching' mechanisms. A new conceptual tool able to capture the richness of the experiences we share with others is introduced: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. I propose that all kinds of interpersonal relations (imitation, empathy and the attribution of intentions) depend, at a basic level, on the constitution of a shared manifold space. This shared space is functionally characterized by automatic, unconscious embodied simulation routines.

Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience shed light on the existence of a common neural mechanism that could account for action and intention to understand abilities in humans and non-human primates. Empirical evidence on the neural underpinnings of action goals and on their ontogeny and phylogeny is introduced and discussed. It is proposed that the properties of the mirror neuron system and the functional mechanism describing them, embodied simulation, enabled pre-linguistic forms of action and intention understanding. Basic aspects of social cognition appear to be primarily based on the motor cognition that underpins one’s own capacity to act, here defined as motor abstraction. On the basis of this new account of the motor system, it is proposed that intersubjectivity is the best conceived of as intercorporeity.

The topic of the human face is addressed from a biocultural perspective, focusing on the empirical investigation of how the face is represented, perceived, and evaluated in artistic portraits and self-portraits from the XVth to the XVIIth century. To do so, the crucial role played by the human face in social cognition is introduced, starting from development, showing that neonatal facial imitation and face-to-face dyadic interactions provide the grounding elements for the construction of intersubjective bonds. The neuroscience of face perception is concisely presented and discussed, together with the psychophysics of face perception and gaze exploration, introducing the notions of the left visual field advantage (LVFA) and the left gaze bias (LGB). The results of experiments on the perception and the emotional and aesthetic rating of artistic portraits and self-portraits are reported, showing that despite participants’ inability to tell self-portraits and portraits apart, greater emotional, communicative-social, and aesthetic ratings were attributed to self-portraits. It is concluded that neuroscience and experimental aesthetics can contribute to better understand the human face, hence to better understand ourselves.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the nature of our social interactions. In order to understand how protective equipment and distancing measures influence the ability to comprehend others’ emotions and, thus, to effectively interact with others, we carried out an online study across the Italian population during the first pandemic peak. Participants were shown static facial expressions (Angry, Happy and Neutral) covered by a sanitary mask or by a scarf. They were asked to evaluate the expressed emotions as well as to assess the degree to which one would adopt physical and social distancing measures for each stimulus. Results demonstrate that, despite the covering of the lower-face, participants correctly recognized the facial expressions of emotions with a polarizing effect on emotional valence ratings found in females. Noticeably, while females’ ratings for physical and social distancing were driven by the emotional content of the stimuli, males were influenced by the “covered” condition. The results also show the impact of the pandemic on anxiety and fear experienced by participants. Taken together, our results offer novel insights on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social interactions, providing a deeper understanding of the way people react to different kinds of protective face covering.

Starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will propose that our capacity to understand others as intentional agents, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, be deeply grounded in the relational nature of our interactions with the world. According to this hypothesis, an implicit, prereflexive form of understanding of other individuals is based on the strong sense of identity binding us to them. We share with our conspecifics a multiplicity of states that include actions, sensations and emotions. A new conceptual tool able to capture the richness of the experiences we share with others will be introduced: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. I will posit that it is through this shared manifold that it is possible for us to recognize other human beings as similar to us. It is just because of this shared manifold that intersubjective communication and ascription of intentionality become possible. It will be argued that the same neural structures that are involved in processing and controlling executed actions, felt sensations and emotions are also active when the same actions, sensations and emotions are to be detected in others. It therefore appears that a whole range of different ‘mirror matching mechanisms’ may be present in our brain. This matching mechanism, constituted by mirror neurons originally discovered and described in the domain of action, could well be a basic organizational feature of our brain, enabling our rich and diversified intersubjective experiences. This perspective is in a position to offer a global approach to the understanding of the vulnerability to major psychoses such as schizophrenia.

The nature of concepts has always been a hotly debated topic in both philosophy and psychology and, more recently, also in cognitive neuroscience. Different accounts have been proposed of what concepts are. These accounts reflect deeply different conceptions of how the human mind works. In the last decades, two diametrically opposed theories of human cognition have been discussed and empirically investigated: the Computational Theory of Mind, on the one hand (Fodor 1983 The modularity of mind: an essay on faculty psychology; Pylyshyn 1984 Computation and cognition: toward a foundation for cognitive science), and Embodied Cognition (Barsalou 2008 Annu. Rev. Psychol. 59, 617–645. (doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639); Gallese & Lakoff 2005 Cogn. Neuropsychol. 22, 455–479 (doi:10.1080/02643290442000310); Shapiro 2011 Embodied cognition), on the other hand. The former proposes that concepts are abstract and amodal symbols in the language of thought, while the latter argues for the embodied nature of concepts that are conceived of as grounded in actions and perception. The embodiment of both concrete and abstract concepts has been challenged by many (e.g. Mahon & Caramazza 2008 J. Physiol. 102, 59–70. (doi:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2008.03.004); Caramazza et al. 2014 Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 37, 1–15. (doi:10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013-013950)). These challenges will be here taken seriously and addressed from a comparative perspective. We will provide a phylogenetic and neurobiologically inspired account of the embodied nature of both abstract and concrete concepts. We will propose that, although differing in certain respect, they both might have a bodily foundation. Commonalities between abstract and concrete concepts will be explained by recurring to the Peircean notions of icon and abductive inference (CP 2.247). According to Peirce, icons are the kind of signs on which abductive inferences rest (Peirce CS 1931 in Collected papers of Charles S. Peirce, Hartshorne C, Weiss P, Burks AW. (eds), 40; Peirce CS 1997 In The 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism (ed. A. Turrisi)). It will be claimed that the mechanism of Embodied Simulation (Gallese & Sinigaglia 2011 Trends Cogn. Sci. 15, 512–519. (doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.09.003)) can be described as an icon (Cuccio V & Caruana F. 2015 Il corpo come icona. Abduzione, strumenti ed Embodied Simulation. Versus, n. 119, 93–103), and it will then be suggested that on these, basic natural signs rest, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, the capacity to conceptualize. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain’.

Successful motor coordination in social interactions requires the rapid interpretation of others’ intentions from their actions. Previous research suggests that individuals use early bodily cues, such as movement kinematics and gaze, to predict others’ behaviour. However, the motor features critical for signaling or decoding potential motor interactions remain unclear. In this study, we measured the kinematics of a basic motor act — grasping an object — executed with either individualistic (to place) or social (to pass) intentions. Subsequently, we conducted two action prediction tasks to identify bodily markers of (social) intentions. Hand positioning on the object emerged as a key kinematic indicator of the intention to interact with a partner, as shown by kinematic analyses and classification of participants’ responses. Eye-tracking analysis revealed the face as the most attended feature during action observation. Notably, these cues were more consistently attended to when observing actions from a frontal — second-person — perspective rather than a lateral — third-person — perspective. Our findings highlight the saliency of hand-object interactions and the face in decoding potential engagement in second-person contexts. They also provide novel evidence for social affordance processing, expressed in action execution and observation, related to potential motor interactions with others. These features in decoding potential engagement in motor interactions.