The notion of a frontoparietal human mirror neuron system (HMNS) has been used to explain a range of social phenomena. However, most human neuroimaging studies of this system do not address critical 'mirror' properties: neural representations should be action specific and should generalise across visual and motor modalities. Studies using repetition suppression (RS) and, particularly, multivari...

The "broken-mirror" theory of autism argues that dysfunction of the "mirror neuron system" is a root cause of social disability in autism. The present paper aims to scrutinize this theory and, when it breaks down, to provide an alternative. Current evidence suggests that children with autism are able to understand and emulate goal-directed actions, but may have specific impairments in automatic...

We have previously shown that a right inferior frontal mirror neuron area for grasping responds differently to observed grasping actions embedded in contexts that suggest different intentions, such as drinking and cleaning (Iacoboni, Molnar-Szakacs, Gallese, Buccino, Mazziotta, & Rizzolatti, 2005). Information about intentions, however, may be conveyed also by the grasping action itself: for in...

BACKGROUND Observing competitive games such as sports is a pervasive entertainment among humans. The inclination to watch others play may be based on our social-cognitive ability to understand the internal states of others. The mirror neuron system, which is activated when a subject observes the actions of others, as well as when they perform the same action themselves, seems to play a crucial ...

What are the necessary and sufficient conditions to experience pleasure in interpersonal communication and dealing with art, science, and philosophy - this is what the theory of informational needs (TIN) suggested eleven years ago is about. At the same time, at the beginning of this century, several lines of research have emerged. Neuroaesthetics has been established; the discovery of the mirro...

Apart from its natural relevance to cognition, music provides a window into the intimate relationships between production, perception, experience, and emotion. Here, emotional responses and neural activity were observed as they evolved together with stimulus parameters over several minutes. Participants listened to a skilled music performance that included the natural fluctuations in timing and...

The capacity to imitate facial gestures is highly variable in rhesus macaques and this variability may be related to differences in specific neurobehavioral patterns of development. This study evaluated the differential neonatal imitative response of 41 macaques in relation to the development of sensory, motor, and cognitive skills throughout the 1st month of life. The results show that infants...

Given the fact that we understand observed action by a sensorimotor link that maps the action onto our motor representations, activity of the mirror neuron system may depend on the sensory and motor features of that action. To investigate this hypothesis, we recorded the activity of Broca's area (BCA) in right-handed individuals during observation of chopstick use using near-infrared spectrosco...

Rapid facial mimicry (RFM) is an automatic response, in which individuals mimic others' expressions. RFM, only demonstrated in humans and apes, is grounded in the automatic perception-action coupling of sensorimotor information occurring in the mirror neuron system. In humans, RFM seems to reflect the capacity of individuals to empathize with others. Here, we demonstrated that, during play, RFM...

Existing theories of empathic response to visual art works postulate the primacy of automatic embodied reaction to images based on mirror neuron mechanisms. Arguing for a more inclusive concept of empathy-related response and integrating four distinct bodies of literature, we discuss contextual, and personal factors which modulate empathic response to depicted people. We then present an integra...