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Self in the mirror
Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1105–1113
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Self in the mirror Wolfgang Prinz ⇑ Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychology, Stephanstrasse 1 a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
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Article history: Available online 12 February 2013 Keywords: Mirror systems Mental self Social mirroring Subjectivity
a b s t r a c t What are mirror systems good for? Several suggestions have been made in response to this question, addressing the putative functions of mirror systems in minds and brains. This paper examines possible contributions of mirror systems to the emergence of subjectivity. At the heart of the discussion is the notion of social mirroring, which has a long tradition in social philosophy and social anthropology. Taking the existence of mirror devices in minds and brains for granted, I argue that social mirroring is a prerequisite for the constitution of mental selves, and, hence, the emergence of subjectivity. However, the fact that self and subjectivity are socially created should not be taken to indicate that they are illusory. They are as real as natural facts are. Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. The looking glass self Mirrors have two faces. In one sense, they are innocent physical things—nothing but polished surfaces reflecting light according to simple geometrical rules. Yet, in another sense, when used by human observers, they are powerful cultural things. This is because mirrors help people to extend the reach of what they can see. Mirrors help people to look around corners and see what is happening behind their backs—as well as allowing them to look at themselves and check their outer appearance. Probably by virtue of this remarkable capacity, in many cultures mirrors have made their career as both technical devices for exploring the outer world and symbolic devices for exploring the inner self. Not only do they function as technical tools for checking one’s outer appearance, but also as symbolic instruments for deeper ways of reflecting one’s inner self. Such symbolic use of mirrors is widespread in Western art and literature. For instance, in the act of portraying oneself, mirrors are often thought to reflect aspects of the artist’s inner self through his or her outer appearance. Occasionally, the act of self-mirroring may even be included in the self-portrait as a symbolic indication of the reflective and reflexive intentions entailed in that act. For instance, the Uffizi Gallery harbors a beautiful painting by the Austrian painter Johannes Gumpp, which shows the painter’s image in a mirror, as well as the painting that he is painting of that image (Gumpp, 1646). In a similar vein, the act of detecting and recognizing oneself in the mirror has become a classical literary topic. Perhaps one of the most dramatic incidences of mirror self-recognition is reported in the myth of Narcissus. According to the testimony of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Narcissus was bound to die at the very moment at which he discovered that the beautiful face in the mirror that he had fallen in love with did not belong to some beloved other but, rather, to himself (Ovid., 1977, p. 157). In more recent times, the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan revitalized the myth of mirror self-recognition. Lacan believed that the very first incidence of mirror self-recognition is a dramatic ‘‘Aha! experience’’ for the young infant—an act of utmost importance in the formation of the human mind and self-consciousness (Amsterdam, 1972; Lacan, 1949/1977). Yet, in the meantime, we have learned that mirror self-recognition cannot be considered a specific signature of human mentality.
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Chimps do it, elephants do it, crows do it, and so do many other species (e.g., Gallup, 1970). Taken together, these observations seem to suggest that mirror self-recognition has perhaps often more to say about these animals’ understanding of mirrors than of themselves. In the context of self-recognition and self-reflection, one also encounters a metaphorical use that applies to social rather than physical mirrors. In social mirroring other individuals serve as mirrors for the self. This notion has, more or less independently, been promoted by a number of classical authorities from social philosophy and social science like, e.g., Cooley (1902), Hegel (1807), Mead (1934), Smith (1759/1976), and Whitehead (2001). The crucial idea here is that individuals come to understand themselves through mirroring themselves in others—that is, by learning to understand how their conduct is perceived, received and understood by others. To address this notion, Cooley (1902) has coined the term ‘‘looking glass self’’. What this suggests is that, for individuals, social mirrors can play a role similar to that of physical mirrors: Both help them to ‘‘see’’ how others perceive them. One may wonder what lies behind the widespread use of mirrors as symbols and metaphors for reflecting the self and reflecting upon the self. What can looking at our outer appearance in the mirror possibly add to what we already know from our inner experience? Do not we have direct, unmediated access to that experience? Obviously, if this were true, mirrors would provide redundant information: they would just replicate knowledge that we already have. In that case, it would be hard to understand how mirrors can have made such a fantastic career as cultural symbols for seeing one’s mind through one’s body. What that career seems to reflect, instead, is that perceiving oneself from the outside may often deliver a clearer and more adequate picture of our true feelings and actions than the inside perspective can provide. This paper examines the looking glass self from a cognitive science perspective. While the classical discussion of this idea in social philosophy and social science is mainly grounded in language as a symbolic mirror between others and the self, a novel view has recently emerged from several branches of cognitive science. This view claims that social mirroring may, likewise, be grounded in actions that serve as embodied mirrors between the self and others. In fact, one may even claim that social mirroring first relies on embodied acting (i.e., the ways in which individuals interact with each other), and only later shifts to symbolic talking (i.e., the ways in which individuals communicate about their acting); e.g., Prinz (2008, 2012, 2013). Adopting this view, we still need to ask how social mirroring works and what it does to individuals. Is there anything serious behind the widespread symbolic and metaphorical use of mirrors for self-recognition and self-reflection? What does it mean for individuals to perceive themselves in ways they otherwise cannot and what can they make of it? Here, I argue that mirrors may indeed play an important role in the formation of our mental selves—provided that the mirrors outside are met by mirrors inside. By mirrors outside I refer to social and physical mirrors that individuals encounter in their environments. By mirrors inside I refer to mirror-like representational devices operating inside their minds. I propose that these two kinds of mirrors interact with each other in ways that give rise to the formation of our mental selves. Over the past decades literature on social mirroring has been scarce, at least as far as solid empirical research is concerned. Accordingly, the framework I am sketching here is not meant to cover and integrate extant empirical evidence. It is rather meant to provide a heuristic basis for guiding future experimental research into mechanisms and practices of social mirroring. 2. Social mirroring To understand social mirroring we need to consider two perspectives, that of the target individual whose acting is being mirrored and that of the mirror individual who is mirroring the target’s acting. For the target individual, the mirror individual provides a living mirror in his or her environment. In what ways can the target individual find his or her own action mirrored through the mirror individual’s action? To answer this question it may be useful to draw two distinctions, one between two basic modes of mirroring and another one between two basic modes of communication. 2.1. Modes of mirroring We may discern two basic modes of mirroring: reciprocal and complementary. In the most fundamental form of social mirroring, reciprocal mirroring, target individual ‘‘T’’ sees her own action imitated, or replicated by mirror individual ‘‘M’’. In a setting like this, M acts as a mirror for T in a more or less literal sense. Social mirrors are, of course, fundamentally different from physical mirrors. Even if M attempts to provide as-perfect-as-possible copies of T’s acting, those copies will always be delayed in time and their kinematics will never be as perfectly correlated with T’s acting as specular images are. We can speak of reciprocal mirroring as long as T is in a position to recognize and understand M’s acting as a delayed copy of her own preceding action. Hence, the constitutive feature of reciprocal mirroring is T’s understanding of M’s action as a copy of T’s own foregoing action. A slightly different form of social mirroring, complementary mirroring, arises when T sees her own action continued and carried on by M rather than simply being replicated. This is, of course, entirely different from what physical mirrors do. Still, what complementary mirroring has in common with reciprocal mirroring is that (1) M’s action is strongly contingent upon T’s preceding action and (2) that contingency needs to be perceived and understood by T. In this case, complementary mirroring requires that T is in a position to assess M’s doing as a continuation of his or her own doing.
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2.2. Modes of communication The scenario considered so far draws on what we may call mirroring through embodied communication. It starts with T acting in a particular way; then M, upon perceiving T’s acting, starts replicating or continuing that action, and eventually that replication or complement is perceived and understood by T. Here, communication is embodied in the sense that it relies on T’s and M’s competence for both production of own action and perception of foreign action. Such embodied mirroring does not require a language system in which the two communicate. It does not even require explicit intentions to communicate something to someone else on either side. The sole requirement is that competent perceivers/actors meet, act and watch each other. Routines for embodied mirroring play an important role in interactions between young infants and their caretakers. Babies and their mothers will often find themselves involved in what has been called ‘‘protoconversational interactions’’ (Trevarthen, 1993, 1998; Trevarthen, Kokkinaki, & Fiamenghi, 1999). They imitate or continue each other’s action and take turns in this funny game from time to time. Though these interactions have been extensively studied, most studies focus on the baby’s production of imitative action but not on their perception of their mother’s imitative action. In other words, most of work in the field views the baby in the role of individual M (who mirrors mother’s actions), but not in the role of individual T (who perceives herself as being mirrored by mother). This, however, is the perspective that we need to adopt if we want to understand how social mirroring contributes to the formation of the self (cf., e.g., Meltzoff, 1990; Nadel, 2002; Paukner, Anderson, Borelli, Visalberghi, & Ferrari, 2005; Trevarthen, 1993; Zukow-Goldring, 2006). Perhaps more familiar to us as adults is action mirroring through symbolic communication. T acts in a particular way, and M, upon perceiving T’s acting, starts talking about T’s acting, and that verbal account is finally perceived and understood by T as referring to her preceding acting. In a setting like this, M’s verbal account of T’s acting can vary not only along the dimension replication/continuation but also along the dimension description/explanation/evaluation. In any case, such symbolic mirroring is dependent on the two individuals’ competences for the production and perception of spoken language. M communicates to T a verbal message concerning T’s action, and that message is then decoded and understood by T. However, competences for production and perception of spoken language are not enough for symbolic mirroring to work. More importantly, the two individuals need to share a conceptual framework for action. They need to draw on a shared action ontology, which specifies for them what actions are, how they can be parsed and individuated, and how physical action can be explained through foregoing mental action. This is precisely what their folk psychology provides—a common-sense framework for action description and explanation to which they resort when they reflect and communicate about what people are doing and why they do what they do (cf., e.g., Bogdan, 1991; Greenwood, 1991; Kusch, 1999; Malle, 2004; Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001). 3. Mirrors inside Let us now see what kinds of representational structures and processing mechanisms target individual T requires in order to be in a position to capitalize on M’s mirroring, to build up a representation of self. Evidently, the mere fact of being mirrored from the outside will not do the job by itself. Pet owners, for instance, will often entertain mirror conversations with their cats and dogs all day long—without any obvious consequences for their pets’ mental architectures. Human babies seem to be different in that respect. They do exploit social mirrors for shaping and, in fact, for making their minds. What then, do humans have that cats and dogs do not? Humans, I submit, utilize mirrors inside. Mirrors inside are representational devices that help people to exploit what mirrors outside afford, henceforth referred to as mirror devices. Basically, these mirror devices serve to couple perception and action. But they do so in a special way, allowing for the operation of similarity between perception and action. 3.1. Design principles How do mirror devices work and how do they interact with mirrors outside? Before we can begin to answer this question, there is a functional problem to be solved: Consider our target individual T, watching what M is doing. Suppose that M will occasionally mirror T, but that, for most of the time, M will be doing something else. This raises the problem of how T can tell mirroring from non-mirroring in M’s actions. As long as this problem is unsolved, T has no way of capitalizing on what the social mirror facing him or her affords. Mirror devices solve this problem by virtue of two basic design principles, common coding and distal reference. The notion of common coding posits a shared representational domain for perception and action. Common coding demands that the same representational resources are used for both, planning and control of own action and perception of foreign action. In other words, tokens of own action will get their entries in that domain on exactly the same dimensions as tokens of foreign action. Common coding makes it possible both to perceive and produce similarity between own action and foreign action. With reference to production, M’s mirroring of T’s acting will rely on production of own action that resembles perceived foreign action (Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001; Prinz, 1990, 1997, 2002, 2005). Conversely, concerning perception, T’s understanding of the mirror nature of M’s action will rely on the perception of foreign
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action as being similar to previously produced own action. Common coding is thus a prerequisite for the mirror game between the two to work. How can representations of own and foreign action be commensurate? The key feature here is distal reference (cf. Prinz, Aschersleben, & Koch, 2009). Distal reference is fairly obvious on the perceptual side (Brunswik, 1944, 1952, 1955). What we see and what we hear are neither patterns of sensory stimulation nor patterns of brain activation. Instead, we perceive objects and events in the environment—distal events rather than proximal stimuli or even central activations. No less obvious is distal reference on the action side. For instance, when we use a hammer to knock a nail into the wall, we do not plan that action in terms of muscle contractions or activations in our motor cortex. Instead, what we plan is the action itself and its intended outcome in the environment (cf. James, 1890, II, p. 520; Wulf & Prinz, 2001). Distal reference has two important implications: efficiency and publicity. Distal representations are efficient in the sense that they represent environmental events in a way that allows the choosing of actions, which satisfy both current goals and current environmental conditions. Distal representations are public in the sense that they represent events in a way that satisfies the needs for successful communication. This is because they refer to public (i.e., shared) events in the environment, not to private (i.e., unshared) patterns of sensory, motor or brain activations. These two design principles underpin mirror devices inside. These mirrors go either way—to produce own action resembling perceived foreign action and to perceive foreign action resembling own action. Their operation is based on priming through similarity. Perceived foreign action will prime corresponding own action, and own action will prime the perception of corresponding foreign action. Accordingly, they provide information about the self through others. They help us to see and understand our own behavior by way of watching others mirroring our behavior. 3.2. Embodied mirrors So much for the design principles. Let us now consider how they are instantiated in the human mind. This brings us back to the two basic modes of mirroring: embodied and symbolic. Embodied devices operate on implicit procedural knowledge for perception and control of bodies and actions. Much of this knowledge is likely to be contained in representational structures that build on innate resources. Conversely, symbolic devices operate on explicit declarative knowledge about bodies and actions. Most of that knowledge will be contained in representational structures that build on acquired, language-based resources. Here, I focus on devices for embodied mirroring, concentrating on two major kinds of such devices: body schemes and action schemes. I posit that these schemes are, from the outset, shared between others and the self—perhaps even having first developed for knowing and understanding others and only then projected back for knowing and understanding the self (Prinz, 2012). Obviously, a view like this poses a challenge to the widely accepted notion that knowledge of one’s own mind is the natural fundament from which knowledge of other minds may derive. Instead, it suggests either the parallel emergence of understanding the self and others or even the reverse order: that knowledge of others is the fundament from which knowledge of the self derives. The notion of body scheme was initially introduced to account for the tacit representational basis of posture and movement (Gallagher, 1995; Gallagher & Meltzoff, 1996; Head, 1920; Schilder, 1935). What kinds of information must body schemes contain and how do they instantiate the design principles for mirrors inside? The natural answer to the first part of the question seems to be that the body scheme must be created from information provided by sense organs in the body, particularly in muscles, tendons and joints. Yet, if we want the body to be spatially and temporarily attuned to the environment we need to represent both, body and environment, in the same format of distal events. Hence, in order to be in a position to control the body from the inside, the body scheme needs to ‘‘know’’ the body from the outside as well. This conclusion is supported by clinical and experimental observations on so-called ‘‘autoscopic’’ phenomena. This term refers to a set of often bizarre experiences that may either be provoked in certain kinds of virtual-reality based experimental settings (Arzy, Seeck, Ortigue, Spinelli, & Blanke, 2006; Blanke, Ortigue, Landis, & Seeck, 2002), or else occur in the context of a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders (e.g., Brugger, 2002, 2005). The key feature of autoscopic phenomena is the illusory reduplication of the body. Patients sometimes feel, or see, either their own body, or some body who comes very close to their own. For instance, in autoscopic hallucinations they see their own face in front of them as if in a mirror, or they see a person facing them and repeating their own actions in a mirror-like fashion. The body scheme acts like a mirror here. Patients see themselves as others and like others, and they look at themselves like others do. These observations suggest that the creation of equivalence between own and foreign body is a genuine function that the body scheme has adopted beyond its role for posture and movement. In these pathologies the own body appears like another one. Experimental evidence suggests that the reverse may hold as well, i.e., that foreign bodies or body parts may be equivalent to one’s own (e.g., van den Bos & Jeannerod, 2002). A striking demonstration of the tight coupling between the inside and the outside perspective on body parts comes from the rubber hand illusion (Armel & Ramachandran, 2003; Botvinick & Cohen, 1998; Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005). When observers watch a rubber hand in front of them while their own hand is hidden behind an occluder they may come to perceive the rubber hand as their own. For instance, when the rubber hand and their own hand are touched simultaneously, they tend to localize that touch in the rubber hand they are watching, not in their own hidden hand. Equivalence of perceiving what happens to others and to the self is also substantiated by brain imaging. Recent studies have shown that, when people observe others being touched or pricked at certain locations on their body surface, this will activate the same brain sites that become active
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when the observer is touched or pricked at these locations (Keysers, Wicker, Gazzola, Anton, & Fogassi, 2004; Singer & Lamm, 2009; Singer et al., 2004). Last but not least, there is another line of evidence suggesting that part of a mirror-like body scheme is already functional at birth. This evidence comes from studies of facial imitation in newborns (Meltzoff, 2002, 2005; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1983, 1989; Nagy et al., 2005). When newborn babies, in the very first hours of their lives, watch a human face performing gestures like opening the mouth or protruding the tongue, they tend to produce similar gestures by themselves. Similarity here concerns both, body parts and action patterns. Babies will respond to tongue protrusion with tongue protrusion, not lip protrusion, and they will respond to lip protrusion with lip protrusion, not lip opening. At least as far as facial parts and gestures are concerned, newborns seem to come with mirrors inside. These help them to relate others’ faces to their own face. The notion of action scheme refers to representational devices for matching own action to foreign action and vice versa. Such devices have been extensively studied over the past two decades, often with explicit reference to the mirror metaphor, using terms like mirror neurons or mirror systems. What kind of information do action schemes contain and how do they instantiate the design principles for embodied mirrors? In a nutshell, the notion of action schemes implies that representational resources subserving the production of (own) action will also subserve the perception of (foreign) action. This notion has recently gained strong support from both behavioral and brain studies. Here, I will focus on the behavioral side. The rationale for behavioral studies is simple and straightforward: If action production and action perception share representational resources, then some kind of interference should result when both perception and production draw on these resources at the same time. Perception of foreign action should then modulate production of own concurrent action, and likewise production of own action should modulate perception of foreign concurrent action. In both cases, the degree of mutual modulation should depend on the representational overlap between perceived and produced action. One line of evidence for this comes from studies showing that action perception may modulate concurrent action production. For instance, it has been shown that the initiation and selection of particular gestures may be modulated by concurrent perception of related gestures (Brass, Bekkering, & Prinz, 2001; Brass, Bekkering, Wohlschläger, & Prinz, 2000; Jacobs & Shiffrar, 2005). The same interference effect may be obtained for the perception of static postures as dynamic gestures. Interference is particularly pronounced for postures reflecting the goal states of the gestures to be produced—suggesting that representations of goal states play a crucial role for the mechanisms underlying gesture selection (Stürmer, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2000). A prominent role for action goals is also supported by studies on imitation. Here, it has been shown that movement errors (i.e., incorrect movements to correct goals) are much more frequent than goal errors (i.e., correct movements to incorrect goals). This suggests that the underlying representational resources must contain more information than just the kinematics of perceived and to-be-produced movements. They seem to contain information about full-fledged goal-directed actions, with goals taking the lead over movements (Bekkering & Prinz, 2002; Bekkering & Wohlschläger, 2002). Further evidence comes from studies showing that action production may modulate the perception of actions and events. In a variety of experimental paradigms, it has been shown that ongoing action may modulate the concurrent perception of related objects, events and actions. For instance, the perception of the direction of an arrow, the orientation of a line or the rotation direction of an ambiguous apparent motion can be modulated through concurrent action (Craighero, Bello, Fadiga, & Rizzolatti, 2002; Craighero, Fadiga, Rizzolatti, & Umiltà, 1998; Craighero, Fadiga, Rizzolatti, & Umiltà, 1999; Koch & Prinz, 2005; Müsseler & Hommel, 1997a,b; Schubö, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 1998, 2001; Wohlschläger, 2000). Remarkably, such modulation is often not only obtained while the action is actually being performed, but also while it is being planned and prepared. Furthermore, it may take either form: facilitation or inhibition. For instance, the planning or execution of rotary hand movements has been shown to facilitate the visual perception of apparent rotary motions in the same direction. Conversely, the pressing of keys on the left vs. right hand side has been shown to impede the perception of arrows pointing in the same direction. Even more evidence comes from a third type of study showing that perceptual performance may depend on action-related knowledge and skills. A famous example is the impact of procedural action knowledge on the perception of motion velocity. On the action side, it has long been known that the velocity of drawing movements is lawfully related to the radius of the trajectory (Viviani, 2002; Viviani & Terzuolo, 1982). More recent studies have shown that the same lawful relationship is also effective in perception. For instance, the velocity of a moving dot is perceived to be constant if (and only if) its motion actually follows the law governing movement production, i.e., if it accelerates and decelerates, depending on local curvature. Conversely, if physical velocity is kept constant, perceived velocity is inversely related to curvature (Viviani, 2002; Viviani & Stucchi, 1992). Again, these findings show that procedural knowledge for action production is also involved in perceptual processing. In summary, the behavioral evidence suggests that action perception and production do, in fact, share common representational resources. Action schemes act like mirrors inside, providing embodied procedures for matching one’s own action to others’. The very same conclusion is, of course, suggested by the literature on mirror neurons and mirror systems, which are involved in action perception and production. In that literature, the evidence comes from both electrophysiological studies of the monkey brain and imaging and interference studies of the human brain (for overviews cf., e.g., Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004; Rizzolatti & Sinigalia, 2007).
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4. Mirror games and policies The mere existence of mirror devices does not guarantee that they can be put to use. For instance, for individuals like Robinson Crusoe who live in isolation, devices like the body or action schemes cannot fulfill their mirror function. For mirror devices to work, two basic conditions must be met. One is that other individuals need to be around. This is what Friday’s advent affords for Robinson Crusoe: mirrors inside need to be complemented by mirrors outside. The other is that the two individuals need to interact in particular ways. This is what their reciprocal acting and talking affords: they need to engage in mirror games. Mirror games are, in other words, social practices designed to confront mirrors inside with mirrors outside. Importantly, humans are not unique in this respect. Many songbirds, for instance, also combine mirror-like representational devices with behavioral practices of interactive mirroring (e.g., Marler & Slabbekoorn, 2004; Zeigler & Marler, 2008). It is far from clear what songbird and human mechanisms and practices have in common and in what ways they differ. A crucial difference may pertain to the kind of operations that are supported by these practices. The interactive practices that are prevalent in songbirds seem to be designed to support active mirroring rather than perception of being mirrored. Accordingly, they seem to be tailored to the needs of skill acquisition rather than self-perception and constitution. Here we focus on the human case, without implying that songbirds, like humans, use their devices for creating subjectivity. 4.1. Mirror games Turning back to human practices, we may discern two basic kinds of mirror games: symbolic and embodied. Whereas symbolic games rely on reciprocal talking about action, embodied games, on which I focus here, rely on reciprocal acting. In early infancy embodied mirroring is the only game in town. For caretakers, the practice of reciprocating or complementing the baby’s doings is common and widespread—perhaps a human universal. For babies, these games seem to be of crucial importance for tuning in with and becoming attached to others, as well as laying the ground for perceiving and understanding themselves like others. However, embodied mirror games are not restricted to interactions with preverbal infants. Mirroring habits also apply to interactions among adults. For instance, an individual may place his hands behind his head while facing another individual doing the same (reciprocation). Likewise, an individual may accompany another individual’s acting through pertinent facial and bodily gestures, thereby commenting on that acting in a non-verbal format. As a rule, such mirroring is not explicitly cultivated as a social practice. Individuals will often have no explicit intention to communicate anything to others and they may not even be aware of what they are doing. Their mirroring reflects automatic habits rather than controlled and cultivated practices (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), and sometimes these habits may even be considered impropriate conduct that ought to be suppressed. Still, from the viewpoint of the others, these implicit habits have exactly the same functions and consequences as explicit practices: they let people perceive and receive their own doings through the mirroring of others. In a nutshell, this is what mirror games afford. They provide self-related information through the other. By engaging in mirror games, people make capital out of their capacity to understand agency in others in order to construe mentality and agency in themselves. In a way, these games exploit others to build selves. 4.2. Mirror policies This term refers to tactics and strategies governing individuals’ proneness to engage and become engaged in mirror games. Here, we may discern two basic dimensions on which mirror policies vary. One concerns conditions under which individuals may be prone to imitate others and/or become imitated by others. Recent evidence suggests (Nagy, 2006; Nagy & Molnar, 2004; Trevarthen, 2003) that even though newborns may, at times, be prepared to not only imitate certain gestures but also provoke imitated responses by their caretakers, at other times, they may be less prepared to do so. Mirroring and becoming mirrored is thus already for them controlled by the proneness to engage in the game. The other dimension of mirror policies concerns selectivity. Individuals may, in fact, be quite selective in playing mirror games. For instance, they may mirror some kinds of behaviors, but not others. They may engage in mirror games under some kinds of circumstances, but not under others. Most importantly, they may be selective with respect to the target individuals whom they mirror. They may be prone to mirror certain individuals, but refuse to mirror certain others. For instance, they may mirror their kids, their folks and perhaps their peers, but perhaps not, or to a much lesser degree, strangers, disabled individuals or old people. We can, therefore, think of each mirror individual as entertaining an implicit list of target individuals with whom he or she is prone to engage in mirror games, and of each target individual as being included in some individuals’ personal mirror lists, but excluded from other individuals’ lists. Mirror policies can, thus, act to induce both, social assimilation and dissimilation—and eventually discrimination. Assimilation is based on the dialectics of mirroring and perceiving being mirrored. Likewise, dissimilation and discrimination are based on the dialectics of refusing to mirror and perceiving being refused. Policies for embodied mirroring may, thus, add to the various kinds of language-based games and policies through which social assimilation and discrimination are established and maintained.
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5. Real selves If it is true that the mental self is created in mirror games, then subjectivity is an artifact made by humans. It is not a natural fact; rather, it is created in attribution discourses and mirror practices, and in the dialectic back and forth of attribution and appropriation. Yet, when one looks at this more closely, attribution discourses and mirror practices actually only explain how individuals come to understand themselves as subjects, building up a representation of their own subjectivity. Representation of subjectivity is not, however, the same as subjectivity itself. Could it, therefore, be that the personal experience of subjectivity and selfhood is nothing more than a collectively produced and shared illusion that has nothing to do with the reality of the subpersonal machinery of cognition and volition? I maintain that this concern is unfounded. Basically, there are two arguments against it: a general and a specific one. The general argument pertains to the ontological status of social artifacts. In the realm of social artifacts, which are created by social exchange, reality is always constructed by representation. Therefore, it would be misleading to conclude that only the subpersonal machinery is real and efficacious, while representations of its workings at the personal level are epiphenomenal and inefficacious. Social artifacts are, on the contrary, real and efficacious by virtue of the beliefs and representations pertaining to them. Popes, presidents and prime ministers are popes, presidents and prime ministers because we consider them to be this. In exactly the same way, subjects are real and efficacious because we (and they themselves) believe them to be. Added to this—and this is the special argument—is the fact that subjects are auto-artifacts, that is, systems which observe themselves and develop representations of their own activity. As we know from systems theory, self-observation can become operative in such auto-referential systems (e.g., Luhmann, 1984/1995). That means that the representations that systems develop of their own activity may acquire the power to control and modulate this activity. In the case at hand, this principle is realized by the fact that personal interpretations of subpersonal processes must, likewise, naturally be borne by subpersonal processes—by processes that are cut from the same cloth as the subpersonal processes which represent the outer world, bring about decisions and control actions. Both kinds of processes are acted out in the same functional medium and can have a direct influence on each other. Are selves real? People have a self in the same sense as they have, for example, money, courts of law, or governments. Money, courts of law, and governments are social institutions that people create and recognize. The same applies to mental selves as auto-artifacts. 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Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Self in the mirror Wolfgang Prinz ⇑ Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychology, Stephanstrasse 1 a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
a r t i c l e
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Article history: Available online 12 February 2013 Keywords: Mirror systems Mental self Social mirroring Subjectivity
a b s t r a c t What are mirror systems good for? Several suggestions have been made in response to this question, addressing the putative functions of mirror systems in minds and brains. This paper examines possible contributions of mirror systems to the emergence of subjectivity. At the heart of the discussion is the notion of social mirroring, which has a long tradition in social philosophy and social anthropology. Taking the existence of mirror devices in minds and brains for granted, I argue that social mirroring is a prerequisite for the constitution of mental selves, and, hence, the emergence of subjectivity. However, the fact that self and subjectivity are socially created should not be taken to indicate that they are illusory. They are as real as natural facts are. Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. The looking glass self Mirrors have two faces. In one sense, they are innocent physical things—nothing but polished surfaces reflecting light according to simple geometrical rules. Yet, in another sense, when used by human observers, they are powerful cultural things. This is because mirrors help people to extend the reach of what they can see. Mirrors help people to look around corners and see what is happening behind their backs—as well as allowing them to look at themselves and check their outer appearance. Probably by virtue of this remarkable capacity, in many cultures mirrors have made their career as both technical devices for exploring the outer world and symbolic devices for exploring the inner self. Not only do they function as technical tools for checking one’s outer appearance, but also as symbolic instruments for deeper ways of reflecting one’s inner self. Such symbolic use of mirrors is widespread in Western art and literature. For instance, in the act of portraying oneself, mirrors are often thought to reflect aspects of the artist’s inner self through his or her outer appearance. Occasionally, the act of self-mirroring may even be included in the self-portrait as a symbolic indication of the reflective and reflexive intentions entailed in that act. For instance, the Uffizi Gallery harbors a beautiful painting by the Austrian painter Johannes Gumpp, which shows the painter’s image in a mirror, as well as the painting that he is painting of that image (Gumpp, 1646). In a similar vein, the act of detecting and recognizing oneself in the mirror has become a classical literary topic. Perhaps one of the most dramatic incidences of mirror self-recognition is reported in the myth of Narcissus. According to the testimony of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Narcissus was bound to die at the very moment at which he discovered that the beautiful face in the mirror that he had fallen in love with did not belong to some beloved other but, rather, to himself (Ovid., 1977, p. 157). In more recent times, the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan revitalized the myth of mirror self-recognition. Lacan believed that the very first incidence of mirror self-recognition is a dramatic ‘‘Aha! experience’’ for the young infant—an act of utmost importance in the formation of the human mind and self-consciousness (Amsterdam, 1972; Lacan, 1949/1977). Yet, in the meantime, we have learned that mirror self-recognition cannot be considered a specific signature of human mentality.
⇑ Fax: +49 (0)341 9940 2330. E-mail address: [email protected] 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.01.007
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Chimps do it, elephants do it, crows do it, and so do many other species (e.g., Gallup, 1970). Taken together, these observations seem to suggest that mirror self-recognition has perhaps often more to say about these animals’ understanding of mirrors than of themselves. In the context of self-recognition and self-reflection, one also encounters a metaphorical use that applies to social rather than physical mirrors. In social mirroring other individuals serve as mirrors for the self. This notion has, more or less independently, been promoted by a number of classical authorities from social philosophy and social science like, e.g., Cooley (1902), Hegel (1807), Mead (1934), Smith (1759/1976), and Whitehead (2001). The crucial idea here is that individuals come to understand themselves through mirroring themselves in others—that is, by learning to understand how their conduct is perceived, received and understood by others. To address this notion, Cooley (1902) has coined the term ‘‘looking glass self’’. What this suggests is that, for individuals, social mirrors can play a role similar to that of physical mirrors: Both help them to ‘‘see’’ how others perceive them. One may wonder what lies behind the widespread use of mirrors as symbols and metaphors for reflecting the self and reflecting upon the self. What can looking at our outer appearance in the mirror possibly add to what we already know from our inner experience? Do not we have direct, unmediated access to that experience? Obviously, if this were true, mirrors would provide redundant information: they would just replicate knowledge that we already have. In that case, it would be hard to understand how mirrors can have made such a fantastic career as cultural symbols for seeing one’s mind through one’s body. What that career seems to reflect, instead, is that perceiving oneself from the outside may often deliver a clearer and more adequate picture of our true feelings and actions than the inside perspective can provide. This paper examines the looking glass self from a cognitive science perspective. While the classical discussion of this idea in social philosophy and social science is mainly grounded in language as a symbolic mirror between others and the self, a novel view has recently emerged from several branches of cognitive science. This view claims that social mirroring may, likewise, be grounded in actions that serve as embodied mirrors between the self and others. In fact, one may even claim that social mirroring first relies on embodied acting (i.e., the ways in which individuals interact with each other), and only later shifts to symbolic talking (i.e., the ways in which individuals communicate about their acting); e.g., Prinz (2008, 2012, 2013). Adopting this view, we still need to ask how social mirroring works and what it does to individuals. Is there anything serious behind the widespread symbolic and metaphorical use of mirrors for self-recognition and self-reflection? What does it mean for individuals to perceive themselves in ways they otherwise cannot and what can they make of it? Here, I argue that mirrors may indeed play an important role in the formation of our mental selves—provided that the mirrors outside are met by mirrors inside. By mirrors outside I refer to social and physical mirrors that individuals encounter in their environments. By mirrors inside I refer to mirror-like representational devices operating inside their minds. I propose that these two kinds of mirrors interact with each other in ways that give rise to the formation of our mental selves. Over the past decades literature on social mirroring has been scarce, at least as far as solid empirical research is concerned. Accordingly, the framework I am sketching here is not meant to cover and integrate extant empirical evidence. It is rather meant to provide a heuristic basis for guiding future experimental research into mechanisms and practices of social mirroring. 2. Social mirroring To understand social mirroring we need to consider two perspectives, that of the target individual whose acting is being mirrored and that of the mirror individual who is mirroring the target’s acting. For the target individual, the mirror individual provides a living mirror in his or her environment. In what ways can the target individual find his or her own action mirrored through the mirror individual’s action? To answer this question it may be useful to draw two distinctions, one between two basic modes of mirroring and another one between two basic modes of communication. 2.1. Modes of mirroring We may discern two basic modes of mirroring: reciprocal and complementary. In the most fundamental form of social mirroring, reciprocal mirroring, target individual ‘‘T’’ sees her own action imitated, or replicated by mirror individual ‘‘M’’. In a setting like this, M acts as a mirror for T in a more or less literal sense. Social mirrors are, of course, fundamentally different from physical mirrors. Even if M attempts to provide as-perfect-as-possible copies of T’s acting, those copies will always be delayed in time and their kinematics will never be as perfectly correlated with T’s acting as specular images are. We can speak of reciprocal mirroring as long as T is in a position to recognize and understand M’s acting as a delayed copy of her own preceding action. Hence, the constitutive feature of reciprocal mirroring is T’s understanding of M’s action as a copy of T’s own foregoing action. A slightly different form of social mirroring, complementary mirroring, arises when T sees her own action continued and carried on by M rather than simply being replicated. This is, of course, entirely different from what physical mirrors do. Still, what complementary mirroring has in common with reciprocal mirroring is that (1) M’s action is strongly contingent upon T’s preceding action and (2) that contingency needs to be perceived and understood by T. In this case, complementary mirroring requires that T is in a position to assess M’s doing as a continuation of his or her own doing.
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2.2. Modes of communication The scenario considered so far draws on what we may call mirroring through embodied communication. It starts with T acting in a particular way; then M, upon perceiving T’s acting, starts replicating or continuing that action, and eventually that replication or complement is perceived and understood by T. Here, communication is embodied in the sense that it relies on T’s and M’s competence for both production of own action and perception of foreign action. Such embodied mirroring does not require a language system in which the two communicate. It does not even require explicit intentions to communicate something to someone else on either side. The sole requirement is that competent perceivers/actors meet, act and watch each other. Routines for embodied mirroring play an important role in interactions between young infants and their caretakers. Babies and their mothers will often find themselves involved in what has been called ‘‘protoconversational interactions’’ (Trevarthen, 1993, 1998; Trevarthen, Kokkinaki, & Fiamenghi, 1999). They imitate or continue each other’s action and take turns in this funny game from time to time. Though these interactions have been extensively studied, most studies focus on the baby’s production of imitative action but not on their perception of their mother’s imitative action. In other words, most of work in the field views the baby in the role of individual M (who mirrors mother’s actions), but not in the role of individual T (who perceives herself as being mirrored by mother). This, however, is the perspective that we need to adopt if we want to understand how social mirroring contributes to the formation of the self (cf., e.g., Meltzoff, 1990; Nadel, 2002; Paukner, Anderson, Borelli, Visalberghi, & Ferrari, 2005; Trevarthen, 1993; Zukow-Goldring, 2006). Perhaps more familiar to us as adults is action mirroring through symbolic communication. T acts in a particular way, and M, upon perceiving T’s acting, starts talking about T’s acting, and that verbal account is finally perceived and understood by T as referring to her preceding acting. In a setting like this, M’s verbal account of T’s acting can vary not only along the dimension replication/continuation but also along the dimension description/explanation/evaluation. In any case, such symbolic mirroring is dependent on the two individuals’ competences for the production and perception of spoken language. M communicates to T a verbal message concerning T’s action, and that message is then decoded and understood by T. However, competences for production and perception of spoken language are not enough for symbolic mirroring to work. More importantly, the two individuals need to share a conceptual framework for action. They need to draw on a shared action ontology, which specifies for them what actions are, how they can be parsed and individuated, and how physical action can be explained through foregoing mental action. This is precisely what their folk psychology provides—a common-sense framework for action description and explanation to which they resort when they reflect and communicate about what people are doing and why they do what they do (cf., e.g., Bogdan, 1991; Greenwood, 1991; Kusch, 1999; Malle, 2004; Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001). 3. Mirrors inside Let us now see what kinds of representational structures and processing mechanisms target individual T requires in order to be in a position to capitalize on M’s mirroring, to build up a representation of self. Evidently, the mere fact of being mirrored from the outside will not do the job by itself. Pet owners, for instance, will often entertain mirror conversations with their cats and dogs all day long—without any obvious consequences for their pets’ mental architectures. Human babies seem to be different in that respect. They do exploit social mirrors for shaping and, in fact, for making their minds. What then, do humans have that cats and dogs do not? Humans, I submit, utilize mirrors inside. Mirrors inside are representational devices that help people to exploit what mirrors outside afford, henceforth referred to as mirror devices. Basically, these mirror devices serve to couple perception and action. But they do so in a special way, allowing for the operation of similarity between perception and action. 3.1. Design principles How do mirror devices work and how do they interact with mirrors outside? Before we can begin to answer this question, there is a functional problem to be solved: Consider our target individual T, watching what M is doing. Suppose that M will occasionally mirror T, but that, for most of the time, M will be doing something else. This raises the problem of how T can tell mirroring from non-mirroring in M’s actions. As long as this problem is unsolved, T has no way of capitalizing on what the social mirror facing him or her affords. Mirror devices solve this problem by virtue of two basic design principles, common coding and distal reference. The notion of common coding posits a shared representational domain for perception and action. Common coding demands that the same representational resources are used for both, planning and control of own action and perception of foreign action. In other words, tokens of own action will get their entries in that domain on exactly the same dimensions as tokens of foreign action. Common coding makes it possible both to perceive and produce similarity between own action and foreign action. With reference to production, M’s mirroring of T’s acting will rely on production of own action that resembles perceived foreign action (Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001; Prinz, 1990, 1997, 2002, 2005). Conversely, concerning perception, T’s understanding of the mirror nature of M’s action will rely on the perception of foreign
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action as being similar to previously produced own action. Common coding is thus a prerequisite for the mirror game between the two to work. How can representations of own and foreign action be commensurate? The key feature here is distal reference (cf. Prinz, Aschersleben, & Koch, 2009). Distal reference is fairly obvious on the perceptual side (Brunswik, 1944, 1952, 1955). What we see and what we hear are neither patterns of sensory stimulation nor patterns of brain activation. Instead, we perceive objects and events in the environment—distal events rather than proximal stimuli or even central activations. No less obvious is distal reference on the action side. For instance, when we use a hammer to knock a nail into the wall, we do not plan that action in terms of muscle contractions or activations in our motor cortex. Instead, what we plan is the action itself and its intended outcome in the environment (cf. James, 1890, II, p. 520; Wulf & Prinz, 2001). Distal reference has two important implications: efficiency and publicity. Distal representations are efficient in the sense that they represent environmental events in a way that allows the choosing of actions, which satisfy both current goals and current environmental conditions. Distal representations are public in the sense that they represent events in a way that satisfies the needs for successful communication. This is because they refer to public (i.e., shared) events in the environment, not to private (i.e., unshared) patterns of sensory, motor or brain activations. These two design principles underpin mirror devices inside. These mirrors go either way—to produce own action resembling perceived foreign action and to perceive foreign action resembling own action. Their operation is based on priming through similarity. Perceived foreign action will prime corresponding own action, and own action will prime the perception of corresponding foreign action. Accordingly, they provide information about the self through others. They help us to see and understand our own behavior by way of watching others mirroring our behavior. 3.2. Embodied mirrors So much for the design principles. Let us now consider how they are instantiated in the human mind. This brings us back to the two basic modes of mirroring: embodied and symbolic. Embodied devices operate on implicit procedural knowledge for perception and control of bodies and actions. Much of this knowledge is likely to be contained in representational structures that build on innate resources. Conversely, symbolic devices operate on explicit declarative knowledge about bodies and actions. Most of that knowledge will be contained in representational structures that build on acquired, language-based resources. Here, I focus on devices for embodied mirroring, concentrating on two major kinds of such devices: body schemes and action schemes. I posit that these schemes are, from the outset, shared between others and the self—perhaps even having first developed for knowing and understanding others and only then projected back for knowing and understanding the self (Prinz, 2012). Obviously, a view like this poses a challenge to the widely accepted notion that knowledge of one’s own mind is the natural fundament from which knowledge of other minds may derive. Instead, it suggests either the parallel emergence of understanding the self and others or even the reverse order: that knowledge of others is the fundament from which knowledge of the self derives. The notion of body scheme was initially introduced to account for the tacit representational basis of posture and movement (Gallagher, 1995; Gallagher & Meltzoff, 1996; Head, 1920; Schilder, 1935). What kinds of information must body schemes contain and how do they instantiate the design principles for mirrors inside? The natural answer to the first part of the question seems to be that the body scheme must be created from information provided by sense organs in the body, particularly in muscles, tendons and joints. Yet, if we want the body to be spatially and temporarily attuned to the environment we need to represent both, body and environment, in the same format of distal events. Hence, in order to be in a position to control the body from the inside, the body scheme needs to ‘‘know’’ the body from the outside as well. This conclusion is supported by clinical and experimental observations on so-called ‘‘autoscopic’’ phenomena. This term refers to a set of often bizarre experiences that may either be provoked in certain kinds of virtual-reality based experimental settings (Arzy, Seeck, Ortigue, Spinelli, & Blanke, 2006; Blanke, Ortigue, Landis, & Seeck, 2002), or else occur in the context of a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders (e.g., Brugger, 2002, 2005). The key feature of autoscopic phenomena is the illusory reduplication of the body. Patients sometimes feel, or see, either their own body, or some body who comes very close to their own. For instance, in autoscopic hallucinations they see their own face in front of them as if in a mirror, or they see a person facing them and repeating their own actions in a mirror-like fashion. The body scheme acts like a mirror here. Patients see themselves as others and like others, and they look at themselves like others do. These observations suggest that the creation of equivalence between own and foreign body is a genuine function that the body scheme has adopted beyond its role for posture and movement. In these pathologies the own body appears like another one. Experimental evidence suggests that the reverse may hold as well, i.e., that foreign bodies or body parts may be equivalent to one’s own (e.g., van den Bos & Jeannerod, 2002). A striking demonstration of the tight coupling between the inside and the outside perspective on body parts comes from the rubber hand illusion (Armel & Ramachandran, 2003; Botvinick & Cohen, 1998; Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005). When observers watch a rubber hand in front of them while their own hand is hidden behind an occluder they may come to perceive the rubber hand as their own. For instance, when the rubber hand and their own hand are touched simultaneously, they tend to localize that touch in the rubber hand they are watching, not in their own hidden hand. Equivalence of perceiving what happens to others and to the self is also substantiated by brain imaging. Recent studies have shown that, when people observe others being touched or pricked at certain locations on their body surface, this will activate the same brain sites that become active
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when the observer is touched or pricked at these locations (Keysers, Wicker, Gazzola, Anton, & Fogassi, 2004; Singer & Lamm, 2009; Singer et al., 2004). Last but not least, there is another line of evidence suggesting that part of a mirror-like body scheme is already functional at birth. This evidence comes from studies of facial imitation in newborns (Meltzoff, 2002, 2005; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1983, 1989; Nagy et al., 2005). When newborn babies, in the very first hours of their lives, watch a human face performing gestures like opening the mouth or protruding the tongue, they tend to produce similar gestures by themselves. Similarity here concerns both, body parts and action patterns. Babies will respond to tongue protrusion with tongue protrusion, not lip protrusion, and they will respond to lip protrusion with lip protrusion, not lip opening. At least as far as facial parts and gestures are concerned, newborns seem to come with mirrors inside. These help them to relate others’ faces to their own face. The notion of action scheme refers to representational devices for matching own action to foreign action and vice versa. Such devices have been extensively studied over the past two decades, often with explicit reference to the mirror metaphor, using terms like mirror neurons or mirror systems. What kind of information do action schemes contain and how do they instantiate the design principles for embodied mirrors? In a nutshell, the notion of action schemes implies that representational resources subserving the production of (own) action will also subserve the perception of (foreign) action. This notion has recently gained strong support from both behavioral and brain studies. Here, I will focus on the behavioral side. The rationale for behavioral studies is simple and straightforward: If action production and action perception share representational resources, then some kind of interference should result when both perception and production draw on these resources at the same time. Perception of foreign action should then modulate production of own concurrent action, and likewise production of own action should modulate perception of foreign concurrent action. In both cases, the degree of mutual modulation should depend on the representational overlap between perceived and produced action. One line of evidence for this comes from studies showing that action perception may modulate concurrent action production. For instance, it has been shown that the initiation and selection of particular gestures may be modulated by concurrent perception of related gestures (Brass, Bekkering, & Prinz, 2001; Brass, Bekkering, Wohlschläger, & Prinz, 2000; Jacobs & Shiffrar, 2005). The same interference effect may be obtained for the perception of static postures as dynamic gestures. Interference is particularly pronounced for postures reflecting the goal states of the gestures to be produced—suggesting that representations of goal states play a crucial role for the mechanisms underlying gesture selection (Stürmer, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2000). A prominent role for action goals is also supported by studies on imitation. Here, it has been shown that movement errors (i.e., incorrect movements to correct goals) are much more frequent than goal errors (i.e., correct movements to incorrect goals). This suggests that the underlying representational resources must contain more information than just the kinematics of perceived and to-be-produced movements. They seem to contain information about full-fledged goal-directed actions, with goals taking the lead over movements (Bekkering & Prinz, 2002; Bekkering & Wohlschläger, 2002). Further evidence comes from studies showing that action production may modulate the perception of actions and events. In a variety of experimental paradigms, it has been shown that ongoing action may modulate the concurrent perception of related objects, events and actions. For instance, the perception of the direction of an arrow, the orientation of a line or the rotation direction of an ambiguous apparent motion can be modulated through concurrent action (Craighero, Bello, Fadiga, & Rizzolatti, 2002; Craighero, Fadiga, Rizzolatti, & Umiltà, 1998; Craighero, Fadiga, Rizzolatti, & Umiltà, 1999; Koch & Prinz, 2005; Müsseler & Hommel, 1997a,b; Schubö, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 1998, 2001; Wohlschläger, 2000). Remarkably, such modulation is often not only obtained while the action is actually being performed, but also while it is being planned and prepared. Furthermore, it may take either form: facilitation or inhibition. For instance, the planning or execution of rotary hand movements has been shown to facilitate the visual perception of apparent rotary motions in the same direction. Conversely, the pressing of keys on the left vs. right hand side has been shown to impede the perception of arrows pointing in the same direction. Even more evidence comes from a third type of study showing that perceptual performance may depend on action-related knowledge and skills. A famous example is the impact of procedural action knowledge on the perception of motion velocity. On the action side, it has long been known that the velocity of drawing movements is lawfully related to the radius of the trajectory (Viviani, 2002; Viviani & Terzuolo, 1982). More recent studies have shown that the same lawful relationship is also effective in perception. For instance, the velocity of a moving dot is perceived to be constant if (and only if) its motion actually follows the law governing movement production, i.e., if it accelerates and decelerates, depending on local curvature. Conversely, if physical velocity is kept constant, perceived velocity is inversely related to curvature (Viviani, 2002; Viviani & Stucchi, 1992). Again, these findings show that procedural knowledge for action production is also involved in perceptual processing. In summary, the behavioral evidence suggests that action perception and production do, in fact, share common representational resources. Action schemes act like mirrors inside, providing embodied procedures for matching one’s own action to others’. The very same conclusion is, of course, suggested by the literature on mirror neurons and mirror systems, which are involved in action perception and production. In that literature, the evidence comes from both electrophysiological studies of the monkey brain and imaging and interference studies of the human brain (for overviews cf., e.g., Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004; Rizzolatti & Sinigalia, 2007).
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4. Mirror games and policies The mere existence of mirror devices does not guarantee that they can be put to use. For instance, for individuals like Robinson Crusoe who live in isolation, devices like the body or action schemes cannot fulfill their mirror function. For mirror devices to work, two basic conditions must be met. One is that other individuals need to be around. This is what Friday’s advent affords for Robinson Crusoe: mirrors inside need to be complemented by mirrors outside. The other is that the two individuals need to interact in particular ways. This is what their reciprocal acting and talking affords: they need to engage in mirror games. Mirror games are, in other words, social practices designed to confront mirrors inside with mirrors outside. Importantly, humans are not unique in this respect. Many songbirds, for instance, also combine mirror-like representational devices with behavioral practices of interactive mirroring (e.g., Marler & Slabbekoorn, 2004; Zeigler & Marler, 2008). It is far from clear what songbird and human mechanisms and practices have in common and in what ways they differ. A crucial difference may pertain to the kind of operations that are supported by these practices. The interactive practices that are prevalent in songbirds seem to be designed to support active mirroring rather than perception of being mirrored. Accordingly, they seem to be tailored to the needs of skill acquisition rather than self-perception and constitution. Here we focus on the human case, without implying that songbirds, like humans, use their devices for creating subjectivity. 4.1. Mirror games Turning back to human practices, we may discern two basic kinds of mirror games: symbolic and embodied. Whereas symbolic games rely on reciprocal talking about action, embodied games, on which I focus here, rely on reciprocal acting. In early infancy embodied mirroring is the only game in town. For caretakers, the practice of reciprocating or complementing the baby’s doings is common and widespread—perhaps a human universal. For babies, these games seem to be of crucial importance for tuning in with and becoming attached to others, as well as laying the ground for perceiving and understanding themselves like others. However, embodied mirror games are not restricted to interactions with preverbal infants. Mirroring habits also apply to interactions among adults. For instance, an individual may place his hands behind his head while facing another individual doing the same (reciprocation). Likewise, an individual may accompany another individual’s acting through pertinent facial and bodily gestures, thereby commenting on that acting in a non-verbal format. As a rule, such mirroring is not explicitly cultivated as a social practice. Individuals will often have no explicit intention to communicate anything to others and they may not even be aware of what they are doing. Their mirroring reflects automatic habits rather than controlled and cultivated practices (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), and sometimes these habits may even be considered impropriate conduct that ought to be suppressed. Still, from the viewpoint of the others, these implicit habits have exactly the same functions and consequences as explicit practices: they let people perceive and receive their own doings through the mirroring of others. In a nutshell, this is what mirror games afford. They provide self-related information through the other. By engaging in mirror games, people make capital out of their capacity to understand agency in others in order to construe mentality and agency in themselves. In a way, these games exploit others to build selves. 4.2. Mirror policies This term refers to tactics and strategies governing individuals’ proneness to engage and become engaged in mirror games. Here, we may discern two basic dimensions on which mirror policies vary. One concerns conditions under which individuals may be prone to imitate others and/or become imitated by others. Recent evidence suggests (Nagy, 2006; Nagy & Molnar, 2004; Trevarthen, 2003) that even though newborns may, at times, be prepared to not only imitate certain gestures but also provoke imitated responses by their caretakers, at other times, they may be less prepared to do so. Mirroring and becoming mirrored is thus already for them controlled by the proneness to engage in the game. The other dimension of mirror policies concerns selectivity. Individuals may, in fact, be quite selective in playing mirror games. For instance, they may mirror some kinds of behaviors, but not others. They may engage in mirror games under some kinds of circumstances, but not under others. Most importantly, they may be selective with respect to the target individuals whom they mirror. They may be prone to mirror certain individuals, but refuse to mirror certain others. For instance, they may mirror their kids, their folks and perhaps their peers, but perhaps not, or to a much lesser degree, strangers, disabled individuals or old people. We can, therefore, think of each mirror individual as entertaining an implicit list of target individuals with whom he or she is prone to engage in mirror games, and of each target individual as being included in some individuals’ personal mirror lists, but excluded from other individuals’ lists. Mirror policies can, thus, act to induce both, social assimilation and dissimilation—and eventually discrimination. Assimilation is based on the dialectics of mirroring and perceiving being mirrored. Likewise, dissimilation and discrimination are based on the dialectics of refusing to mirror and perceiving being refused. Policies for embodied mirroring may, thus, add to the various kinds of language-based games and policies through which social assimilation and discrimination are established and maintained.
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5. Real selves If it is true that the mental self is created in mirror games, then subjectivity is an artifact made by humans. It is not a natural fact; rather, it is created in attribution discourses and mirror practices, and in the dialectic back and forth of attribution and appropriation. Yet, when one looks at this more closely, attribution discourses and mirror practices actually only explain how individuals come to understand themselves as subjects, building up a representation of their own subjectivity. Representation of subjectivity is not, however, the same as subjectivity itself. Could it, therefore, be that the personal experience of subjectivity and selfhood is nothing more than a collectively produced and shared illusion that has nothing to do with the reality of the subpersonal machinery of cognition and volition? I maintain that this concern is unfounded. Basically, there are two arguments against it: a general and a specific one. The general argument pertains to the ontological status of social artifacts. In the realm of social artifacts, which are created by social exchange, reality is always constructed by representation. Therefore, it would be misleading to conclude that only the subpersonal machinery is real and efficacious, while representations of its workings at the personal level are epiphenomenal and inefficacious. Social artifacts are, on the contrary, real and efficacious by virtue of the beliefs and representations pertaining to them. Popes, presidents and prime ministers are popes, presidents and prime ministers because we consider them to be this. In exactly the same way, subjects are real and efficacious because we (and they themselves) believe them to be. Added to this—and this is the special argument—is the fact that subjects are auto-artifacts, that is, systems which observe themselves and develop representations of their own activity. As we know from systems theory, self-observation can become operative in such auto-referential systems (e.g., Luhmann, 1984/1995). That means that the representations that systems develop of their own activity may acquire the power to control and modulate this activity. In the case at hand, this principle is realized by the fact that personal interpretations of subpersonal processes must, likewise, naturally be borne by subpersonal processes—by processes that are cut from the same cloth as the subpersonal processes which represent the outer world, bring about decisions and control actions. Both kinds of processes are acted out in the same functional medium and can have a direct influence on each other. Are selves real? People have a self in the same sense as they have, for example, money, courts of law, or governments. Money, courts of law, and governments are social institutions that people create and recognize. The same applies to mental selves as auto-artifacts. 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