A predictive processing model of perception and action for self-other distinction

In everyday social interaction we constantly try to deduce and predict the underlying intentions behind others' social actions, like facial expressions, speech, gestures, or body posture. This is no easy problem and the underlying cognitive mechanisms and neural processes even have been dubbed the,,dark matter" of social neuroscience (Przyrembel et al., 2012). Generally, action recognition is assumed to rest upon principles of prediction-based processing (Clark, 2013), where predictions about expected sensory stimuli are continuously formed and evaluated against incoming sensory input to inform further processing. Such a predictive processing does not only inform our perception of actions of others, but also our action production in which we constantly predict the sensory consequences of our own actions and correct them in case of deviations. Both of these processes are assumed to be supported by the structure of the human sensorimotor system that is characterised by perception-action coupling (Prinz, 1997) and common coding of the underlying representations.