Our environment offers us a number of opportunities for action. However, sometimes we also have to refrain from acting, for example, when facing a "do not touch" sign placed over a desirable object on the shelf of a shop. Previous findings emphasized the role of mesial frontal and prefrontal regions in the inhibition of stimulus-driven motor responses [1-3], leading to the prediction that motor...

Converging experimental evidence indicates that mirror neurons in the monkey premotor area F5 encode the goals of observed motor acts [1-3]. However, it is unknown whether they also contribute to encoding the perspective from which the motor acts of others are seen. In order to address this issue, we recorded the visual responses of mirror neurons of monkey area F5 by using a novel experimental...

The discovery of mirror neurons has been hailed as one of the most 1 exciting developments in neuroscience in the past few decades. These neurons dis2 charge in response to the observation of others’ actions. But how are we to understand 3 the function of these neurons? In this paper I defend the idea that mirror neurons are 4 best conceived as components of a sensory system that has the functi...

Electrophysiological data confirm the existence of neurons that respond to both motor and sensory events in the macaque brain. These mirror neurons respond to execution and observation of goal-orientated actions. It has been suggested that they comprise a neural basis for encoding an internal representation of action. In this paper the evidence for a parallel system in humans is reviewed and th...

Action understanding lies at the heart of social interaction. Prior research has often conceptualized this capacity in terms of a motoric matching of observed actions to an action in one's motor repertoire, but has ignored the role of object information. In this manuscript, we set out an alternative conception of intention understanding, which places the role of objects as central to our observ...

Fifty years ago, Niko Tinbergen defined the scope of behavioural biology with his four problems: causation, ontogeny, survival value and evolution. About 20 years ago, there was another highly significant development in behavioural biology-the discovery of mirror neurons (MNs). Here, I use Tinbergen's original four problems (rather than the list that appears in textbooks) to highlight the diffe...

Mirror neurons are a relatively new phenomena, first observed in the premotor cortex of macaque monkeys when a number of neurons were observed to respond both when a monkey performed a goal orientated task, and when the monkey watched another (human or monkey) perform that task. A number of researchers have suggested that mirror neurons also exist in humans. It is proposed that a human mirror n...