Formal approaches in the age of mirror neurons: Hints from computational psychoanalysis

The functional architectures approach, either implemented with hard or soft computation, or with mixed models, has been one of the most fruitful conceptual tools that allowed cognitive science to reach an integration of contributions from different disciplines, such as neurosciences, cognitive neuropsychology, I.T., linguistics and so on. In the last two decades, the discovery of mirroring systems in the animal and human brain is questioning this unitary approach, by introducing what is in fact becoming a new paradigm of research, embodied cognition. Here I will present some features of the psychoanalytic theories, especially in their more formal contributions, which could favor a better integration of disembodied and embodied cognition.