Predictive coding: an account of the mirror neuron system

By James M. Kilner, Karl J. Friston, ChrisD . Frith. 2007

1,037 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Is it possible to understand the intentions of other people by simply observing their actions? Many believe that this ability is made possible by the brain’s mirror neuron system through its direct link between action and observation. However, precisely how intentions can be inferred through action observation has provoked much debate. Here we suggest that the function of the mirror system can be understood within a predictive coding framework that appeals to the statistical approach known as empirical Bayes. Within this scheme the most likely cause of an observed action can be inferred by minimizing the prediction error at all levels of the cortical hierarchy that are engaged during action observation. This account identifies a precise role for the mirror system in our ability to infer intentions from actions and provides the outline of the underlying computational mechanisms.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Prediction, Cognition and the Brain (2009, background): “Illustrating its importance, the anticipatory nature of many cognitive functions and neural systems, such as motor control (Wolpert and Flanagan, 2001), motor imagery and action understanding (Jeannerod, 2001; Kilner et al., 2007), visual processing and attention (Mehta and Schaal, 2002; Enns and Ll”
A free energy principle for a particular physics (2019, background): “sponds during action and action observation. From a biological perspective, this is interesting because it speaks to an empirical phenomena known as mirror neuron activity (Gallese and Goldman, 1998; Kilner et al., 2007; Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004). FIGURE 22 Epistemic foraging. This figure show”
Predictive Coding as a Model of Response Properties in Cortical Area V1 (2010, background): “…regions at preceding stages along an information processing pathway to calculate the residual error, which is then propagated via cortical feedforward connections (Mumford, 1992; Barlow, 1994; Rao and Ballard, 1999; Murray et al., 2004; Friston, 2005, 2009; Jehee et al., 2006; Kilner et al., 2007).”
Mechanisms of social cognition. (2012, background): “Tracking intentions Predictive coding: updating estimated intention through prediction, error signals relating expected to observed behavior (e.g., Kilner et al. 2007) pSTS/TPJ (and mPFC)”
Precise minds in uncertain worlds: predictive coding in autism. (2014, background): “Importantly, in predictive coding this same hierarchical model that is used for forward action generation also serves inverse inference: figuring out goals from observed actions (Kilner et al., 2007).”
From cognitivism to autopoiesis: towards a computational framework for the embodied mind (2016, background): “…although the elegance of comparator models has led to experimental and clinical applications across a variety of cognitive (Frith 2012), social (Kilner et al. 2007; Koster-Hale and Saxe 2013) and affective domains (Seth 2013; Seth et al. 2012), it should be clear that they are…”
ALE meta-analysis of action observation and imitation in the human brain (2010, neutral): “This view is largely based on conceptualising mirror properties as a matching between sensory input and motor acts (e.g., Kilner et al., 2007; Jakobs et al., 2009) and stressing the importance of such a mechanism for action observation, execution, and crucially also imitation (e.g., Fabbri-Destro…”
Physiologically Inspired Model for the Visual Recognition of Transitive Hand Actions (2013, neutral): “…computational models for goal-directed action recognition have focused on the role of motor representations (Haruno et al., 2001; Wolpert et al., 2003) and specifically of the mirror neuron system (Oztop and Arbib, 2002; Demiris and Simmons, 2006; Oztop et al., 2006; Kilner et al., 2007).”
Binding and unbinding the auditory and visual streams in the McGurk effect. (2012, methodology): “…et al., 2010a), the assumption that the dorsal route could play a role in audiovisual speech binding is raised, which is also compatible with the predictive role associated to this circuit by Kilner et al. (2007), and its application to audiovisual speech processing by Skipper et al. (2007).”
Being Together in Time: Musical Experience and the Mirror Neuron System (2009, background): “Only having access to a visual representation of the kinematic level, an observer must thus be able to infer the intention behind the observed movement at either the goal level or the intention level (Kilner et al., 2007a, 2007b) .”
The Rhetoric and Reality of Anthropomorphism in Artificial Intelligence (2019, methodology): “In addition to its popularity as a model of information processing in the visual cortex (Huang and Rao 2011), predictive coding has also been extended to sensorimotor functions (Körding and Wolp-ert 2007) and mirror neuronal systems (Kilner et al. 2007).”
Language as a Tool for Interacting Minds (2010, background): “The alignment of action plans and goals enables interacting agents to optimize their predictive models (Roepstorff, 2004; Kilner et al., 2007) by providing a common ground against which actions and expressive behaviours can be interpreted (Clark and Brennan, 1991).”
The free energy principle made simpler but not too simple (2022, neutral): “From a biological perspective, this is interesting because it speaks to an empirical phenomenon known as mirror neuron activity [101–103].”