Stimulus Dependence in Mirror Neuron Systems

This study examined how stimuli content (emotionally expressive face and body images) influenced the location of mirror neuron activity as indexed by EEG mu-wave suppression. Participants completed an emotion-identification task in which they viewed black and white images of bodies and faces and identified them as displaying either fear or anger while their brain activity was recorded with EEG. This study predicted that emotional face stimuli would produce mu-wave suppression in posterior areas of the brain while expressive gestural-based body stimuli would produce suppression in the more central areas of the brain. EEG analysis indicated that both face and body stimuli induced significant mu-wave suppression, but face and body stimuli did not differ in amount of mu-wave suppression across regions of interest.