2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

While at the Academy I have also benefited from meeting faculty
members from the larger Columbia community such as Taylor
Carman, Chris Peacocke and Akeel Bilgrami in the Philosophy Department,
and Nina Tandon, Stuart Firestein and Sarah Woolley in
Bio-engineering, Neuroscience & Biology. Besides my presentations
at the internal seminars, I have given five different invited talks
outside the Academy. These talks created incredible interdisciplinary
connections. Here I shall just mention an important collaboration
that I have begun with psychologist Elizabeth Torres at Rutgers
University, studying the kinematic differences between intentional
and non-intentional movements and how the physical misdirection
of magicians’ movements exploits our typical perceptual dynamics.
But, perhaps most important, this year has given me the opportunity
to deepen my own research projects. I continue to develop
my doctoral research critically analyzing the implicit choices and
theoretical frameworks surrounding the discovery and popularization
of so-called mirror neurons. My seminar paper in the Fall
focused on this research and on my alternative “social affordance”
model of the neurological findings in question.
The main idea is that our sensorimotor response to the perception
of others’ actions cannot simply be seen as a local “mirroring”
of the action types observed. Rather our neurological response
must be seen as much more complex and context-dependent than
hitherto admitted. I point to growing evidence that not only the
intentional actions of others but also salient potential actions (affordances)
of the self and the other are tracked as they are related
to one another in a shared space. I am still working on some of the
many consequences of the proposed “social affordance model” for
our general understanding of social interactions, testing in developmental
psychology, and the role of sensorimotor cognition in higher
cognitive processes and pathologies such as autism.
Another project that has sprung out of my “social affordance”
thinking has to do with aesthetics experiences and what I call “the
aesthetic stance.” I claim that we cannot simply look at the content
of artworks as isolated stimuli and then check for correlating activities
in the brain, but must analyze the layers and roles of “framing
affordances” in different art forms, and try to understand the
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