British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2015) © 2015 The British Psychological Society www.wileyonlinelibrary.com Special issue paper Engagement: Looking beyond the mirror to understand action understanding Vasudevi Reddy 1 and Sebo Uithol 2,3 * 1 Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, UK 2 Bernstein Centre for Advanced Neuroimaging, Charit e Universit € atsmedizin, Berlin, Germany 3 Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Italy In this paper, we argue that the current focus on mirroring as the route to explaining the development of action understanding is misleading and problematic. It facilitates a fundamentally spectatorial stance, ignoring engagement and dialogue; it focuses on similarity between self and other and neglects difference; and it succumbs to the static terminology of mechanism rather than a dynamic language of process. Contrary to this view, dialogic exchanges are evident from the start of life, revealing infants’ ability to engage with and respond appropriately to actions that are outside their own motor repertoire. We suggest that engagement rather than mirroring better accounts for many current findings in action understanding. The neurological evidence to date shows that action perception involves a process of continuous synchronization and change, suggesting that it might be more fruitful for research and theory to look beyond mirroring and instead adopt dynamic processual explanations of action understanding within interaction. The argument that infants’ understanding of others’ actions originates in infants’ own action capabilities (Hunnius & Bekkering, 2014; Woodward & Gerson, 2014) is both cogent and consistent with the majority of current views in developmental neuroscience. In essence, the argument is that the neural systems that underpin infants’ own actions are strongly connected to, and indeed drive, infants’ ‘analysis’ of others’ actions. This claim appears to be both strongly supported by current evidence and logically unimpeachable. If action is prospectively controlled (and there is good reason to believe that it is), then there must be ‘abstract’ intentional (and prospective) relations between goal and own movement which, when present, must also be available to infants when they perceive others’ movements in relation to potential goals. The claim is heavily grounded in neuroscience with discoveries of mirror mechanisms allowing the perception of intentional relations in others’ actions on the basis of own action production. In all, despite some recent criticisms, 1 the claim seems compelling. *Correspondence should be addressed to Sebo Uithol, Charit e Universita ¨tsmedizin Berlin, Bernstein Centre for Advanced Neuroimaging, Philipstrasse 13, Haus 6, 10115 Berlin, Germany (email: sebouithol@gmail.com). 1 Recent criticisms of the mirroring theory of action understanding have argued that mirroring is in fact a by-product of associative learning (Heyes, 2010) and not necessary for action understanding (Hamilton, 2009; Hickok, 2009). DOI:10.1111/bjdp.12106 1