23 24 Mirror neurons were first discovered in area F5 of macaque monkeys. In humans, 25 non-invasive studies have demonstrated an increased BOLD signal in homologous 26 motor areas during action observation. One approach to demonstrating that this 27 indicates the existence of mirror neurons in humans has been to employ fMRI 28 adaptation to test whether the same population of neurons is active...

In response to our call for papers for a special issue of Journal of Experimental Child Psychology on functions and mechanisms of imitation in childhood, we received a surprisingly large number of manuscripts on a wide range of topics. We were happy and encouraged that so much interesting work is being done on imitation, and sorry that space and time constraints meant that we could not publish ...

We present an approach for grasp recognition and imitation based on models for canonical and mirror neurons, recently found in neurophysiological experiments. Canonical Neurons seem to code object affordances, e.g. possible ways of grasping. Mirror Neurons code goal directed tasks, like precision or power grasping of an object. The major feature of this neuron population is the use of motor inf...

Mirror neurons are brain systems found in monkeys and humans that respond similarly to actions and to the perception of actions of others. This paper explores the implications of mirror neurons for several important philosophical problems, including knowledge of other minds, the nature of empathy, and moral motivation. It argues that mirror neurons provide a direct route to other minds, empathy...

Previous neuroimaging research has attempted to demonstrate a preferential involvement of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) in the comprehension of effector-related action word (verb) meanings. These studies have assumed that Broca's area (or Brodmann's area 44) is the homologue of a monkey premotor area (F5) containing mouth and hand mirror neurons, and that action word meanings are shared ...

In the present study, we describe a new type of visuomotor neurons, named tool-responding mirror neurons, which are found in the lateral sector of monkey ventral premotor area F5. Tool-responding mirror neurons discharge when the monkey observes actions performed by an experimenter with a tool (a stick or a pair of pliers). This response is stronger than that obtained when the monkey observes a...

A vicarious experience is an empathetic state in response to the observation of others’ sensations, emotions, and actions (Keysers and Gazzola, 2009). Vicarious experiences in response to social stimuli are quite common in the general healthy population and they may even constitute an important basis for social behavior. Interestingly, vicarious experiences recruit similar neural processes as t...

M irror neurons are a class of neurons, originally discovered in the premotor cortex of monkeys, that discharge both when individuals perform a given motor act and when they observe others perform that same motor act. Ample evidence demonstrates the existence of a cortical network with the properties of mirror neurons (mirror system) in humans. The human mirror system is involved in understandi...

The neural processes underlying sensory-motor integration have always attracted strong interest. The classic view is that action and perception are two extremes of mental operations. In the past 2 decades, though, a large number of discoveries have indeed refuted such an interpretation in favor of a more integrated view. Specifically, the discovery of mirror neurons in monkey premotor cortex is...

There is a tension between the embodied approach to cognition (e.g., Varela et al., 1991; Anderson, 2003; Wilson and Foglia, 2011; Myachykov et al., 2014) and the neurocentric way of thinking. It manifests in the research on mirror neurons (Caramazza et al., 2014), action language understanding (Meteyard et al., 2012), or decisionmaking (Kubanek and Snyder, 2015), to mention just a few examples...