Valentino will present an updated version of his presentation at the International Association for Cognitive Conference conference in Rome this summer, which he will also present at a coming conference in cognitive science in Lublin. Welcome to discuss this line of research, onsite or on zoom.

Human beings exhibit similar bodily behaviour (Villar et al. 2019) – although characterised by different “styles”, including information concerning identity, personality, and emotions (Troje 2008). Conversely, human bodily behaviour differs from that of non-human animals. Such differences are important, since empathetic perception (Zlatev 2013) allows us, and other animals, to appreciate agency and intentions by observing actions. Such empathetic perception does not imply full understanding of the other, but in general, the more similar and the more familiar the observed behaviour, the greater the empathy. 

We are designing an empirical study extending this phenomenological analysis using second- and third-person methods within the cognitive semiotic framework of phenomenological triangulation (Zlatev & Mouratidou 2024). Our study will investigate empathetic perception in human participants of 6 bodily acts by presenting point-light display images of such acts (Johansson 1973). The dependent variables include (a) the type of agent: other people, chimpanzees and cats, and (b) the type of act: both intransitive, like running, and transitive, like eating. Biological similarity and cultural familiarity will be compared and quantified through the number of recognised motor acts, where the participant will be asked to identify both (a) the type of agent and (b) the type of act observed.