Perspective Taking, Empathy and Visual Impairment

An Embodied and Multimodal Account of the Mirroring System

Abstract

In the contemporary dialogue between special pedagogy and neuroscience, the mirror neuron system can be considered an opportunity to question how understanding of the other emerges from the intertwining of bodily experience, sensory information and the educational relationship. Perspective taking may be understood as the ability to assume a spatial point of view different from one’s own and, at the same time, as a more complex process of decentring, through which a person distinguishes his/her own perceptual, emotional and cognitive position from that of others. This dimension is particularly relevant to empathy, since approaching the experience of the other seems to require continuous modulation between one’s own body and the differentiation of the self. In light of these considerations, visual impairment allows this connection to be explored in depth, showing how access to the meaning of another person’s action and experience can be organized through alternative sensory channels. The absence of visual perception thus becomes a theoretically generative condition for rethinking the embodied foundations of empathy and designing educational environments based on vicarious senses, such as hearing, touch and proprioception. Based on these premises, the contribution stimulates a theoretical-argumentative reflection on perspective taking, empathy and visual impairment within Embodied Education.