Mirror neurons were discovered over twenty years ago in the ventral premotor region F5 of the macaque monkey. Since their discovery much has been written about these neurons, both in the scientific literature and in the popular press. They have been proposed to be the neuronal substrate underlying a vast array of different functions. Indeed so much has been written about mirror neurons that las...

Spike-timing-dependent plasticity is considered the neurophysiological basis of Hebbian learning and has been shown to be sensitive to both contingency and contiguity between pre- and postsynaptic activity. Here, we will examine how applying this Hebbian learning rule to a system of interconnected neurons in the presence of direct or indirect re-afference (e.g. seeing/hearing one's own actions)...

Our actions, and those of others, are often partly obscured from view. This complicates the sensory inputs that guide motor actions. In this issue of Neuron, Umilità and colleagues demonstrate that "mirror neurons" in ventral premotor cortex respond when monkeys observe hidden, but inferred, actions.

In the ventral premotor cortex (area F5) of the monkey there are neurons that discharge both when the monkey performs specific motor actions and when it observes another individual performing a similar action (mirror neurons). Previous studies on mirror neurons concerned hand actions. Here, we describe the mirror responses of F5 neurons that motorically code mouth actions. The results showed th...

Mirror neurons discharge during the execution of hand object-directed actions and during the observation of the same actions performed by other individuals. These neurons were first identified in the ventral premotor cortex (area F5) and later on in the inferior parietal lobule of monkey brain, thus constituting the mirror neuron system. More recently, mirror neurons for mouth object-directed a...

Perhaps no other application of mirror neuron hypothesizing has been characterized by as much speculation as that of the relation between mirror neurons and the autistic phenotype. Following one highly visible research study (Dapretto et al., 2006), the popular press buzzed that “Autism, Some Researchers Believe, May Involve Broken Mirror Neurons” (New York Times, Blakeslee, 2006) and that a “L...

Mirror neurons for manipulation fire both when the animal manipulates an object in a specific way and when it sees another animal (or the experimenter) perform an action that is more or less similar. Such neurons were originally found in macaque monkeys, in the ventral premotor cortex, area F5 and later also in the inferior parietal lobule. Recent neuroimaging data indicate that the adult human...

The discovery of mirror neurons (e.g., Gallese et al., 1996) has reignited interest in theories that postulate a tight functional link between perception and action. According to these theories, perception and action share a common representational code, with actions coded in terms of the distal perceptual effects that they produce (Prinz, 1997). Accordingly, action representations should be ac...

This article argues that mirror neurons originate in sensorimotor associative learning and therefore a new approach is needed to investigate their functions. Mirror neurons were discovered about 20 years ago in the monkey brain, and there is now evidence that they are also present in the human brain. The intriguing feature of many mirror neurons is that they fire not only when the animal is per...

Mirror neurons are a particular class of visual and motor neurons, first discovered in area F5 of the premotor cortex in monkeys. To humans, brain activity they are involved in mirror neurons occurs in r parietal cortex. An important functional aspect of mirror neurons is the relationship between the motor and visual properties. All mirror neurons show a congruence between actions that respond ...