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What Happened to Mirror Neurons?

Ten years ago, Perspectives in Psychological Science published the Mirror Neuron Forum, in which authors debated the role of mirror neurons in action understanding, speech, imitation, and autism and asked whether mirror neurons are acquired through visual-motor learning. Subsequent research on these...

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Autores principales: Heyes, Cecilia, Catmur, Caroline
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8785302/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34241539
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691621990638
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author Heyes, Cecilia
Catmur, Caroline
author_facet Heyes, Cecilia
Catmur, Caroline
author_sort Heyes, Cecilia
collection PubMed
description Ten years ago, Perspectives in Psychological Science published the Mirror Neuron Forum, in which authors debated the role of mirror neurons in action understanding, speech, imitation, and autism and asked whether mirror neurons are acquired through visual-motor learning. Subsequent research on these themes has made significant advances, which should encourage further, more systematic research. For action understanding, multivoxel pattern analysis, patient studies, and brain stimulation suggest that mirror-neuron brain areas contribute to low-level processing of observed actions (e.g., distinguishing types of grip) but not to high-level action interpretation (e.g., inferring actors’ intentions). In the area of speech perception, although it remains unclear whether mirror neurons play a specific, causal role in speech perception, there is compelling evidence for the involvement of the motor system in the discrimination of speech in perceptually noisy conditions. For imitation, there is strong evidence from patient, brain-stimulation, and brain-imaging studies that mirror-neuron brain areas play a causal role in copying of body movement topography. In the area of autism, studies using behavioral and neurological measures have tried and failed to find evidence supporting the “broken-mirror theory” of autism. Furthermore, research on the origin of mirror neurons has confirmed the importance of domain-general visual-motor associative learning rather than canalized visual-motor learning, or motor learning alone.
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spelling pubmed-87853022022-01-25 What Happened to Mirror Neurons? Heyes, Cecilia Catmur, Caroline Perspect Psychol Sci Article Ten years ago, Perspectives in Psychological Science published the Mirror Neuron Forum, in which authors debated the role of mirror neurons in action understanding, speech, imitation, and autism and asked whether mirror neurons are acquired through visual-motor learning. Subsequent research on these themes has made significant advances, which should encourage further, more systematic research. For action understanding, multivoxel pattern analysis, patient studies, and brain stimulation suggest that mirror-neuron brain areas contribute to low-level processing of observed actions (e.g., distinguishing types of grip) but not to high-level action interpretation (e.g., inferring actors’ intentions). In the area of speech perception, although it remains unclear whether mirror neurons play a specific, causal role in speech perception, there is compelling evidence for the involvement of the motor system in the discrimination of speech in perceptually noisy conditions. For imitation, there is strong evidence from patient, brain-stimulation, and brain-imaging studies that mirror-neuron brain areas play a causal role in copying of body movement topography. In the area of autism, studies using behavioral and neurological measures have tried and failed to find evidence supporting the “broken-mirror theory” of autism. Furthermore, research on the origin of mirror neurons has confirmed the importance of domain-general visual-motor associative learning rather than canalized visual-motor learning, or motor learning alone. SAGE Publications 2021-07-09 2022-01 /pmc/articles/PMC8785302/ /pubmed/34241539 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691621990638 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Article
Heyes, Cecilia
Catmur, Caroline
What Happened to Mirror Neurons?
title What Happened to Mirror Neurons?
title_full What Happened to Mirror Neurons?
title_fullStr What Happened to Mirror Neurons?
title_full_unstemmed What Happened to Mirror Neurons?
title_short What Happened to Mirror Neurons?
title_sort what happened to mirror neurons?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8785302/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34241539
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691621990638
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