From The Village Effect by Susan Pinker, p. 77:
“It was not so much the actors’ gestures that elicited a response, Iacoboni suggests, but the degree to which a test subject identified with the particular actor on the screen.”
This appeared in a discussion of experiments with people’s reactions to seeing an actor on a screen engaging in some activity, athletic, say. Muscles might tense or small movements would mirror the actor’s activity, sparked by the mirror neuron system.
Might this have something to do with teaching?
Later I read, on p. 77 also: “Not only that, but when people are interacting face-to-face, unconscious mimicry elicits emotions that grease the wheels of social interaction.Studies by MIT’s Sandy Pentland and his team have shown that the more people mirror each other in conversation, the more they say they trust each other.”
How would this work in the classroom with, for example, a tprs teacher interacting with the class? Unconscious mimicry would increase the level of identification with the teacher (and the teacher with the students, which is not a bad thing by any means) and further research may reveal that something in that triggers the acquisition response of the brain, of the LAD.