Motivation
The perceptions of an action, on a basic level, have already become my action.
Again from Imitation and Education (bold emphasis mine):
The convergence of all this evidence suggests that [William] James was right. On a very basic level, action and perception are not necessarily separate faculties that always need to be connected through something called "motivation" or an "act of will"; rather, action and perception are built on the same mental foundation. As I watch somebody doing something, there is evidence to suggest that I simultaneously and automatically think of myself doing the same action. There is, at least sometimes, no extra step connecting the actions of another to my own actions. The perceptions of an action, on a basic level, have already become my action. The key question in imitation, then, is not why some actions we perceive motivate imitative action; rather, the question is why we do not imitate all the actions we perceive.
