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Previous studies have demonstrated that motor abilities allow us not only to execute our own actions and to predict their consequences, but also to predict others' actions and their consequences. But just how deeply are motor abilities implicated in action observation? If an observer is prevented from acting while witnessing others' actions, will this impact on their making sense of others' behavior? We recorded proactive eye movements while participants observed an actor grasping objects. The participants' hands were either freely resting on the table or tied behind their back. Proactivity of gaze behavior was dramatically impaired when participants observed others' actions with their hands tied. Since we don't literally perceive actions with our hands, the effect may be explained by the hypothesis that effective observation of action depends not only on motor abilities but on being in a position to exercise them. This suggests, for the first time, that actions are observed best when we are actually in the position to perform them. (Contains 2 figures.)

The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition By Gregory Hickok. New York, NY: 1/1t.W. Norton, 2014. 292 pp. Hardcover, $20.00; Kindle, $14.55. 'You can fool [...]

The article explores the features that distinguish acting jointly from acting in parallel but merely individually. Topics discussed include states of the agent and their explanatory relation to acting jointly, competing attempts to characterise a single phenomenon, and mechanistically neutral strategy for characterising acting jointly.

Social life rests in large part on the capacity to understand the intentions behind the behavior of others. What are the origins of this capacity? How is one to construe its development in ontogenesis? By assuming that action understanding can be explained only in terms of the ability to read the minds of others--that is, to represent mental states--the traditional view claims that a sharp discontinuity occurs in both phylogeny and ontogeny. Over the last few years this view has been challenged by a number of ethological and psychological studies, as well as by several neurophysiological findings. In particular, the functional properties of the mirror neuron system and its direct matching mechanism indicate that action understanding may be primarily based on the motor cognition that underpins one's own capacity to act. This article aims to elaborate and motivate the pivotal role of such motor cognition, providing a biologically plausible and theoretically unitary account for the phylogeny and ontogeny of action understanding and also its impairment, as in the case of autistic spectrum disorder. Keywords: action understanding, motor cognition, mirror neurons, autism, social cognition