Previous research in Cognitive Science has often treated social cognition as residing on top of a cognitive hierarchy. Recently, however, it has become clear that basic perception action links can do a lot of the work in social cognition that was previously attributed to high-level inferences. Using examples from music and other domains I will first demonstrate how establishing perception action links while learning new motor skills can reshape a person’s perception, e.g., the ability to play piano shapes perception of self-produced sounds. Then, I will show that a person’s skills can also affect perception of events that others produce, e.g., the ability to play piano shapes perception of sounds produced by others. Finally, I will demonstrate that the inability to sense one's own body can lead to subtle impairments of a person’s understanding of others' expectations. All of these results suggest that close perception action links play a crucial role in perceiving, predicting, and understanding others' actions. The social nature of perception action links also generates new perspectives for understanding interpersonal action coordination and agency in social interaction.