Body Influences on Social Cognition Through Interoception

Playing chess requires perspective taking in order to consistently infer the opponent’s next moves. The present study examined whether long-term chess players are more advanced in visual perspective taking tasks than their counterparts without chess training during laboratory visual perspective taking tasks. Visual perspective taking performance was assessed among 11- to 12-year-old experienced chess players (n = 15) and their counterparts without chess training (n = 15) using a dot perspective task. Participants judged their own and the avatar’s visual perspective that were either consistent with each other or not. The results indicated that the chess players out-performed the non-chess players (Experiment 1), yet this advantage disappeared when the task required less executive functioning (Experiment 2). Additionally, unlike the non-chess players whose performance improved in Experiment 2 when the executive function (EF) demand was reduced, the chess players did not show better perspective taking under such condition. These findings suggested that long-term chess experience might be associated with children’s more efficient perspective taking of other people’s viewpoints without exhausting their cognitive resources.

To many scientists and philosophers, embodied cognition lacks validity, since it fails to offer extraordinary evidence. In this article, we claim that the development of one possible evidence-based embodied cognition could initiate a considerable research project through the inner workings of bodily constitutive neuro-machinery. We call it “interoceptive embodied cognition”; here, the concept of interoception plays the role of filling in the (inner) gap of vacuous embodiment. The most important tenet of embodied cognition for our purpose is the standard of constitution to which we will repeatedly return. We will look back to the three standards of embodied cognition and then regard interoception as the (inner) filling-in echoing the constitution standard of embodied cognition. We will then demonstrate the varieties and constituents of interoception. Next, we will present interoception’s close relationship to at least four subdomains of embodied cognition, which include: (a) sense of embodiment, (b) embodied self, (c) embodied emotion, and (d) embodied social cognition. Finally, we will conclude with the preliminaries of interoceptive embodied cognition.

Background: Since its discovery in the late 20th century, research on mirror neurons has become a pivotal area in neuroscience, linked to various cognitive and social functions. This bibliometric analysis explores the research trajectory, key research topics, and future trends in the field of mirror neuron research.Methods: We searched the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database for publications from 1996 to 2024 on mirror neuron research. Statistical and visualization analyses were performed using CiteSpace and VOSviewer.Results: Publication output on mirror neurons peaked in 2013 and remained active. High‐impact journals such as Science, Brain, Neuron, PNAS, and NeuroImage frequently feature findings on the mirror neuron system, including its distribution, neural coding, and roles in intention understanding, affective empathy, motor learning, autism, and neurological disorders. Keyword clustering reveals major directions in cognitive neuroscience, motor neuroscience, and neurostimulation, whereas burst detection underscores the emerging significance of brain‐computer interfaces (BCIs). Research methodologies have been evolving from traditional electrophysiological recordings to advanced techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and BCIs, highlighting a dynamic, multidisciplinary progression.Conclusions: This study identifies key areas associated with mirror neurons and anticipates that future work will integrate findings with artificial intelligence, clinical interventions, and novel neuroimaging techniques, providing new perspectives on complex socio‐cognitive issues and their applications in both basic science and clinical practice.

We used the virtual hand illusion paradigm to study how sense of agency and sense of (body) ownership can interact with different emotional events on stress feelings. Converging evidence for at least the partial independence of agency and ownership was found. For instance, sense of agency was a better predictor of individual anxiety levels than sense of ownership and males showed stronger effects related to agency—presumably due to gender-specific attribution styles and empathy skills. Moreover, agency and ownership also interacted with emotional events and led to different anxiety levels. Taken together, our findings suggest that the disentangled sense of agency and sense of ownership can interact with different emotional events and influenced stress feelings more in threatening situations than awarding ones.