Socioeconomic status (SES) has been linked to differences in the degree to which people are attuned to others. Those who are lower in SES also tend to be more interpersonally attuned. However, to date, this work has not been demonstrated using neural measures. In the present electroencephalogram study, we found evidence that lower SES was linked to stronger Mu-suppression during action observat...

Mirror neurons are a specific type of visuomotor neuron that discharge both when a monkey executes a motor act and when it observes a similar motor act performed by another individual. In this article, we review first the basic properties of these neurons. We then describe visual features recently investigated which indicate that, besides encoding the goal of motor acts, mirror neurons are modu...

Mirror neurons, discovered by Rizzolatti et al. in the 1990s , have been the subject of much debate. There are many theories regarding their possible function, both evolutionarily as well as in day to day life. It has been proposed that mirror neurons are the single neuron substrates of the Common Code , which links perceptual and action representations to allow the brain to predict of the outc...

Based on mirror neurons' properties, viewers are emotionally engaged when observing others - even when not actively interacting; therefore, characterizing non-participatory action-viewing as isolated may be misleading. Instead, we propose a continuum of socio-emotional engagement. We also highlight recent developmental work that uses a second-person perspective, investigating behavioral, physio...

All interpersonal interactions are underpinned by action: perceiving and understanding the actions of others, and responding by planning and performing self-made actions. Perception of action, both self-made and observed, informs ongoing motor responses by iterative feedback within a perception-action loop. This fundamental phenomenon occurs within single-cells of the macaque brain which demons...

[This corrects the article on p. 396 in vol. 9, PMID: 26236215.].

We challenge Cook et al.'s claim about the vagueness of the notion of action understanding in relation with mirror neurons. We show the multidimensional nature of action understanding and provide a definition of motor-based action understanding, shedding new light on the various components of action understanding and on their relationship. Finally, we propose an alternative perspective on the o...

Converging evidence indicates that the processing of some aspects related to the phonetic and the semantic components of language is tightly associated with both the perceptual and the motor neural systems. It has been suggested that mirror neurons contribute to language understanding by virtue of a neurophysiological response matching perceptual linguistic information onto corresponding motor ...