A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkey's premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental...

Mirror neurons and canonical neurons are two classes of visuomotor neurons that are activated by different visual stimuli (Rizzolatti and Kalaska, 2012). Mirror neurons respond to a biological effector interacting with an object (Gallese et al., 1996), suggesting their role in action recognition, while canonical neurons respond to the presentation of a graspable object (Murata et al., 1997), an...

This paper discusses the relevance of the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys and of the mirror neuron system in humans to a neuroscientific account of primates' social cognition and its evolution. It is proposed that mirror neurons and the functional mechanism they underpin, embodied simulation, can ground within a unitary neurophysiological explanatory framework important aspects of human ...

The mirror neuron theory of action understanding makes predictions concerning how the limited motor repertoire of young infants should impact on their ability to interpret others' actions. In line with this theory, an increasing body of research has identified a correlation between infants' abilities to perform an action, and their ability to interpret that action as goal-directed when performe...

In the original version of this Article, Wei Wang and Xin Zhang were incorrectly listed as being affil

Previous studies demonstrated that observing another person's grasp action modulated the observer's attention to the object in a manner congruent with another person's action goal. These studies suggest that this grasp-cueing effect results from representation of the observer's understanding of action intention in the mirror neuron system. This system serves as the neural mechanism underlying a...

In the ventral premotor cortex of the macaque monkey, there are neurons that discharge both during the execution of hand actions and during the observation of the same actions made by others (mirror neurons). In the present study, we show that a subset of mirror neurons becomes active during action presentation and also when the final part of the action, crucial in triggering the response in fu...

Mirror neurons are defined as neurons in the monkey cortex which respond to goal oriented actions, whether the behavior is self-generated or produced by another. Here we briefly review this literature and consider evidence from behavioral, neuropsychological, and brain imaging studies for a similar mirror neuron system in humans. Furthermore, we review functions of this system related to action...

Historically, data from brain imaging and brain stimulation studies have supported the idea that the processing of observed actions recruits - among other areas - a distinct sub-set of brain sites in the sensory and motor cortices. These empirical findings have initially been linked with the thesis of direct matching as a mechanism of action understanding, i.e., the idea of motor resonance impl...

Complex human behavior is organized around temporally distal outcomes. Behavioral studies based on tasks such as normal prehension, multi-step object use and imitation establish the existence of relative hierarchies of motor control. The retrieval errors in apraxia also support the notion of a hierarchical model for representing action in the brain. In this review, three functional brain imagin...