Single neuron responses in humans during execution and observation of actions

By Roy Mukamel, Arne D. Ekstrom, Jonas T. Kaplan, Marco Iacoboni, Itzhak Fried. Current Biology, 2010

1,114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Direct recordings in monkeys have demonstrated that neurons in frontal and parietal areas discharge during execution and perception of actions [1-8]. Because these discharges "reflect" the perceptual aspects of actions of others onto the motor repertoire of the perceiver, these cells have been called mirror neurons. Their overlapping sensory-motor representations have been implicated in observational learning and imitation, two important forms of learning [9]. In humans, indirect measures of neural activity support the existence of sensory-motor mirroring mechanisms in homolog frontal and parietal areas [10, 11], other motor regions [12-15], and also the existence of multisensory mirroring mechanisms in nonmotor regions [16-19]. We recorded extracellular activity from 1177 cells in human medial frontal and temporal cortices while patients executed or observed hand grasping actions and facial emotional expressions. A significant proportion of neurons in supplementary motor area, and hippocampus and environs, responded to both observation and execution of these actions. A subset of these neurons demonstrated excitation during action-execution and inhibition during action-observation. These findings suggest that multiple systems in humans may be endowed with neural mechanisms of mirroring for both the integration and differentiation of perceptual and motor aspects of actions performed by self and others.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70d3e49c976fbb43b10931f1be303223bccc80f3

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Citations in the corpus

Empathy: Gender effects in brain and behavior (2014, background): “A more extended study with depth electrode recordings in human mirror neurons investigated 21 patients undergoing surgery for otherwise intractable epilepsy (Mukamel et al., 2010).”
Gestures Enhance Foreign Language Learning (2012, background): “In fact, if learners are instructed to perform a gesture they are presented with mechanisms of imitation and thus mirror neuron circuits might become active and enhance learning (Vogt et al. 2007; Vogt & Thomaschke 2007; Mukamel et al. 2010).”
Physiologically Inspired Model for the Visual Recognition of Transitive Hand Actions (2013, positive): “…neurons in human cortex (Chong et al., 2008; Dinstein et al., 2008; Lingnau et al., 2009), single-cell recordings in humans demonstrate the existence of action-selective and mirror neurons in various areas in the human cortex, including the supplementary motor area (SMA) (Mukamel et al., 2010).”
The thing that should not be: predictive coding and the uncanny valley in perceiving human and humanoid robot actions (2011, background): “The exact relationship between mirror neurons and brain areas that support action perception in the human brain remains a topic of debate (e.g. Dinstein et al., 2007; Chong et al., 2008; Kilner et al., 2009; Mukamel et al., 2010).”
Neural and Computational Mechanisms of Action Processing: Interaction between Visual and Motor Representations. (2015, positive): “In humans, mirror neurons were recorded in mesial motor areas and the hippocampus (Mukamel et al., 2010).”
Brain regions with mirror properties: a meta-analysis of 125 human fMRI studies. (2012, background): “…magnetic stimulation (TMS), electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and human single cell recordings (Mukamel et al., 2010) to provide further evidence for fronto-parietal mirror neuron regions in humans (for recent reviews see Iacoboni and Dapretto,…”
The role of prediction in social neuroscience (2012, background): “The only known single neuron recordings of the proposed mirror system in the human brain comes from Mukamel et al. (2010), who intriguingly found activity in the hippocampus, an area never before included in the classical mirror system.”
Reintegrating the Study of Accuracy Into Social Cognition Research (2011, background): “Recent data suggest that even the hippocampus and posterior medial frontal cortex exhibit overlapping engagement during action observation and imitation (Mukamel, Ekstrom, Kaplan, Iacoboni, & Fried, 2010 ).”