Our environment offers us a number of opportunities for action. However, sometimes we also have to refrain from acting, for example, when facing a "do not touch" sign placed over a desirable object on the shelf of a shop. Previous findings emphasized the role of mesial frontal and prefrontal regions in the inhibition of stimulus-driven motor responses [1-3], leading to the prediction that motor...

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...

Converging experimental evidence indicates that mirror neurons in the monkey premotor area F5 encode the goals of observed motor acts [1-3]. However, it is unknown whether they also contribute to encoding the perspective from which the motor acts of others are seen. In order to address this issue, we recorded the visual responses of mirror neurons of monkey area F5 by using a novel experimental...

The term mirror neurons originally referred to neurons in the ventral premotor cortex of macaque monkeys (area F5, Figure 1a) that have the particularity of responding both when the monkey performs a particular action (e.g., grasping a peanut) and when the monkey perceives another individual performing a similar action. More recently the term mirror has been extended to areas of the human brain...

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

The traditional 'mark test' has shown some large-brained species are capable of mirror self-recognition. During this test a mark is inconspicuously placed on an animal's body where it can only be seen with the aid of a mirror. If the animal increases the number of actions directed to the mark region when presented with a mirror, the animal is presumed to have recognized the mirror image as its ...

The Gemini primary mirror support incorporates a system of hydraulic whiffletrees to carry the mirror weight and define its position. The six orthogonal kinematic degrees of freedom are controlled by six hydraulic zones -three axial, two lateral, plus a transverse lateral. By varying the fluid volumes in these hydraulic zones the mirror position can be adjusted in all six degrees of freedom. Be...

This paper reports a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) resonant varifocal mirror integrated with piezoresistive focus sensor. The varifocal mirror is driven electrostatically at a resonant frequency of a mirror plate to obtain the wide scanning range of a focal length. A piezoresistor is used to monitor the focal length of the varifocal mirror. The device is made of a silicon-on-insulator (...

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 ...