Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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processing of invariant aspects of faces (e.g., Kanwisher, McDermott, &
Chun, 1997). By contrast, the superior temporal sulcus might be more involved
in processing variable aspects of faces, those that carry emotional
expressions (Hoffman & Haxby, 2000).
Empathy Revisited
The ability to recognize biologically significant actions and expressions and
to exploit this information for communication between individuals can
operate at different levels. At the beginning of this chapter, arguments were
presented for the choice of focusing our attention on recognition of other
selves at the level of embodied selves, as opposed to narrative selves. Yet,
within this limitation, there are still several possibilities for thinking of
others’ minds. Following Goldie (1999), we will describe two of those, contagion
and empathy, which can both be interpreted in terms of the simulation
of mental states but with different contents.
Actions and emotions are contagious; they can be caught like colds.
Suffering from a contagious emotion transmitted by another individual,
however, is not a sufficient condition for understanding this individual’s
mental states: it provides the information that the person one sees is enacting
a certain type of behavior or experiencing a certain type of emotion, but
it does not tell what the action is or what the emotion is about. In the realm
of action recognition, a concept developed during the 19th century, ideomotor
action (Lotze, 1852), seems close to the concept of contagion of
emotions. Ideomotor action accounts for the familiar observation that people
tend to perform the movements they see. This phenomenon is particularly
observed in situations with an emotional content, where the observer feels
strongly involved (e.g., watching sports actions). It has been argued that
ideomotor action is a direct mapping of perceived movements onto the corresponding
motor output. This possibility may sound familiar to those who
adhere to the so-called direct perception–action transformation heralded by
the Gibsonian school (see Jeannerod, 1993, for review). It has been used to
explain not only interactions with the visual environment (e.g., steering
locomotion, avoiding obstacles, maintaining posture) but also relationships
between selves (Neisser, 1993). In this conception, ideomotor phenomena
could represent a form of compulsive imitation where the subject cannot
refrain from reproducing the perceived performance. Examples of this sort
are contagious yawning or laughing. This could also be the case for resonant
behavior observed in other species (e.g., wing flapping in bird flocks). True
imitation, by contrast, would have the additional property of not being bound