Understanding Others’ Behavior: Effect of One’s Own Experience

For social animals, including humans, it is important to be able to understand and predict others’ actions. Previous studies have shown that not only human infants but also great apes can detect others’ goals or intentions from their actions. The discovery of the mirror neuron system led to the suggestion that one’s own action experience affects understanding of others’ actions. For example, in one study 3-month-old infants predicted the goal of another individual’s reaching behavior after experiencing similar reaching themselves. In this chapter, I review some studies about abilities to understand others' mental states and the effect of one's own action experience in human infants and non-human primates. I then introduce our own research projects on this topic, for which our study species were capuchin monkeys and dogs. The results of these three projects suggest that one's own active experience affects the understanding of others’ actions, and that this relationship might have the same underlying mechanisms in diverse species.