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162 Socially Intelligent Agents4.2 Action captureAction capture is defined as the act of mapping another person’s bodilymovements or postures onto one’s own motor program or proprioception. Thismapping connects different modalities; one observes another person’s body exteroceptively(mainly visually) and moves or proprioceptively feels one’s ownbody, as shown in Figure 19.5. Together with joint attention, action captureenables the robot to indirectly experience someone else’s behavior, by translatingthe other person’s behavior 〈i, o〉 into its own virtual behavior 〈i ′ ,o ′ 〉,asillustrated in Figure 19.6.seeingsomeoneelse’sbody(exteroception)caregiverrobotmovingone’sownbody(proprioception)Figure 19.5.Mapping between self and another person.• •anotherioselfo ′i ′• •objectFigure 19.6.Indirect experience of another person’s behavior.A number of researchers have suggested that people are innately equippedwith the ability to capture another person’s actions; some of the mechanismsthey have cited are neonatal mimicry [6] and mirror neurons [7]. Neonatalmimicry of some facial expressions is, however, so restricted that it does notfully account for our capability of whole-body imitation. Mirror neurons foundin the pre-motor cortex of macaques activate when they observe someone doinga particular action and when they do the same action themselves. However, theclaim that mirror neurons are the innate basis for action capture is not clear,since macaques do not imitate at all [4, 9].