Mirroring has been almost exclusively analysed in motor terms with no reference to the body that carries the action. According to the standard view, one activates motor representations upon seeing other people moving. However, one does not only see movements, one also sees another individual's body. The following questions then arise. To what extent does one recruit body representations in social context? And does it imply that body representations are shared between self and others? This latter question is all the more legitimate since recent evidence indicates the existence of shared cortical networks for bodily sensations, including pain (e.g., Singer et al., 2004) and touch (e.g., Keysers et al., 2004; Blakemore et al., 2005). But if body representations are shared, then it seems that their activation cannot suffice to discriminate between one's body and other people's bodies. Does one then need a "Whose" system to recognize one's body as one's own, in the same way that Jeannerod argued that one needs a "Who" system to recognize one's actions as one's own?
Shared body representations and the "Whose" system