Alex Pitti

University of Tokyo, Japan

Shared circuits for representing the self related to others' actions, agency and space

Summary

A large body of literature in neuroscience emphasizes the role of embodiment for intelligence. In fact, many important cognitive skills go beyond the simple structuring of the sensorimotor information flow to create dynamic, cross-modal and shared neural representations of the self related to others: e.g., for representing actions performed by oneself and others (the mirror neurons system), for representing our own body image along with the peripersonal space (visual receptive fields), or to sense our own agency (the feeling that I am the cause or author of the movement) and the perceptual presence of others. These features are assumed to be a determinant bootstrap for babies to acquire later on higher cognitive skills such as self-awareness and attention to others. Psychological observations suggest that they are built from the temporal extent of our sensorimotor skills (e.g. synchrony, contingency detection) and that the contextual environment can modulate these perceptual experiences at the neural level by enhancing or even disrupting this sensorimotor coordination.

We propose that the biological mechanism of spike-timing-dependent synaptic plasticity, discovered to regulate the neural dynamics synchronization at the millisecond order in many parts of the central nervous system, could underlie some of the computational mechanisms for modeling such functional integration in sensorimotor networks: the coherence or the dissonance in the sensorimotor information flow will impart then the neural representations. In robotic experiments using proprioceptive, tactile or visual feedback information we simulate how low-level action representation, agency, spatial representation could arise in sensorimotor networks. Our results suggest a basic stage representing the self related to others at the raw level.