Hurley/The Shared Circuits Model: BBS Call for Commentators

================================================================== *** CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. Please note that this is NOT a formal invitation. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Hurley-0525… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than July 11, 2007 NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ================================================================== ** Target Article Information ** ================================================================== To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an unedited, uncorrected target article is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. This unedited draft has been prepared only for potential commentators who wish to nominate themselves for formal commentary invitation. Please DO NOT write a commentary until you receive a formal invitation. If you are invited to submit a commentary, a copyedited, corrected version of this paper will be posted in the invitation letter. The commentary invitation list is compiled by the Editors so as to balance proposals, areas of expertise, and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. TITLE: The Shared Circuits Model: How Control, Mirroring and Simulation Can Enable Imitation, Deliberation, and Mindreading AUTHOR: Susan Hurley ABSTRACT: Imitation, deliberation, and mindreading are characteristically human sociocognitive skills. Research on imitation and its role in social cognition is flourishing across various disciplines; it is here surveyed under headings of behavior, subpersonal mechanisms, and functions of imitation. A model is then advanced within which many of the developments surveyed can be located and explained. The shared circuits model explains how imitation, deliberation, and mindreading can be enabled by subpersonal mechanisms of control, mirroring and simulation. It is cast at a middle, functional level of description, between the level of neural implementation and the level of conscious perceptions and intentional actions. The shared circuits model connects shared informational dynamics for perception and action with shared informational dynamics for self and other, while also showing how the action/perception, self/other and actual/possible distinctions can be overlaid on these shared informational dynamics. It avoids the common conception of perception and action as separate and peripheral to central cognition. Rather, it contributes to the situated cognition movement by showing how mechanisms for perceiving action can be built on those for active perception. The shared circuits model is developed heuristically, in five layers that can be combined in various ways to frame specific ontogenetic or phylogenetic hypotheses. The starting point is dynamic online motor control, whereby an organism is closely attuned to its embedding environment through sensorimotor feedback. Onto this are layered functions of prediction and simulation of feedback, mirroring, simulation of mirroring, monitored inhibition of motor output, and monitored simulation of input. Finally, monitored simulation of input specifying possible actions plus inhibited mirroring of such possible actions can generate information about the possible as opposed to actual instrumental actions of others, and the possible causes and effects of such possible actions, enabling strategic social deliberation. Multiple instances of such shared circuits structures could be linked into a network permitting decomposition and recombination of elements, enabling flexible control, imitative learning, understanding of other agents, and instrumental and strategic deliberation. While more advanced forms of social cognition, which require tracking multiple others and their multiple possible actions, may depend on interpretative theorizing or language, the shared circuits model shows how layered mechanisms of control, mirroring and simulation can enable distinctively human cognitive capacities, for imitation, deliberation and mindreading. KEYWORDS: Keywords: action, active perception, control, embodied cognition, imitation, instrumental deliberation, isomorphism, mindreading, mirroring, mirror neurons, shared circuits, simulation, social cognition FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Hurley-05252004/Referees/ ================================================================== *** CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. Please note that this is NOT a formal invitation. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Hurley-0525… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than July 11, 2007 NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ================================================================== ================================================================== Barbara Finlay - Editor Paul Bloom - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------