Mirror neurons, which have now been found in the human and songbird as well as the macaque, respond to both the observation and the performance of the same action. It has been suggested that their matching response properties have evolved as an adaptation for action understanding; alternatively, these properties may arise through sensorimotor experience. Here I review mirror neuron response cha...

For a long time, imitation learning has been a key topic of psychology and cognitive sciences. Recent progress in neurosciences has, however, opened the way to a better understanding of the neural foundations of the complex mechanisms of imitation and has formed the basis for computational studies of its neural correlates. A key event in this development was the discovery of the so-called ‘mirr...

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...

Humans commonly understand the unobservable mental states of others by observing their actions. Embodied simulation theories suggest that this ability may be based in areas of the fronto-parietal mirror neuron system, yet neuroimaging studies that explicitly investigate the human ability to draw mental state inferences point to the involvement of a “mentalizing" system consisting of regi...

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...

In the mirror neuron system, the canonical neurons play a role in object shape and observer-object relation recognition. However, there are almost no functional models of canonical neurons towards the integration of these two functions. We attempt to represent the relative position between the object and the robot in a neural network model. Although at present some generative models based on th...

Recent evidence suggests a link between autism and the human mirror neuron system. In this paper, I argue that temporal disruption from the environment may play an important role in the observed mirror neuron dysfunction, leading in turn to the pattern of deficits associated with autism. I suggest that the developing nervous system of an infant may be particularly prone to temporal noise that c...

Motor representations in the human mirror neuron system are tuned to respond to specific observed actions. This ability is widely believed to be influenced by genetic factors, but no study has reported a genetic variant affecting this system so far. One possibility is that genetic variants might interact with visuomotor associative learning to configure the system to respond to novel observed a...