The Observation and Execution of Actions Share Motor and Somatosensory Voxels in all Tested Subjects: Single-Subject Analyses of Unsmoothed fMRI Data

By Valeria Gazzola, Christian Keysers. Cerebral Cortex, 2008

710 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many neuroimaging studies of the mirror neuron system (MNS) examine if certain voxels in the brain are shared between action observation and execution (shared voxels, sVx). Unfortunately, finding sVx in standard group analyses is not a guarantee that sVx exist in individual subjects. Using unsmoothed, single-subject analyses we show sVx can be reliably found in all 16 investigated participants. Beside the ventral premotor (BA6/44) and inferior parietal cortex (area PF) where mirror neurons (MNs) have been found in monkeys, sVx were reliably observed in dorsal premotor, supplementary motor, middle cingulate, somatosensory (BA3, BA2, and OP1), superior parietal, middle temporal cortex and cerebellum. For the premotor, somatosensory and parietal areas, sVx were more numerous in the left hemisphere. The hand representation of the primary motor cortex showed a reduced BOLD during hand action observation, possibly preventing undesired overt imitation. This study provides a more detailed description of the location and reliability of sVx and proposes a model that extends the original idea of the MNS to include forward and inverse internal models and motor and sensory simulation, distinguishing the MNS from a more general concept of sVx.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2dc8ee828fbcc2a24263ed49c2505793a978440

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Citations in the corpus

Single neuron responses in humans during execution and observation of actions (2010, background): “Interestingly, some fMRI studies have also reported decreased BOLD signal in primary motor cortex during action-observation [12].”
The functional role of the parieto-frontal mirror circuit: interpretations and misinterpretations (2010, background): “Additional cortical areas (such as the dorsal premotor cortex and the superior parietal lobule) have also been occasionally found to be active during action observation and executio”
Where do mirror neurons come from? (2010, background): “, 1996), and there is evidence of a similar system in the human brain (Gazzola and Keysers, 2009; Iacoboni et al., 1999).”
ALE meta-analysis of action observation and imitation in the human brain (2010, neutral): “While an involvement of sensorimotor cortices during action observation has been demonstrated in a recent study explicitly dealing with this issue (Gazzola and Keysers, 2009), other studies provide evidence that somatosensory cortical regions also respond to the sight of touch (Blakemore et al.”
Shared Neural Circuits for Mentalizing about the Self and Others (2010, methodology): “The first system, coding for low-level embodied/ simulative representations, exists within frontal operculum/ ventral premotor cortex (FO/PMv) (Gazzola & Keysers, 2009; Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh, & Keysers, 2006; Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004), somatosensory cortices (SI/SII)…”
Understanding interpersonal action coordination: an fMRI study (2011, background): “Two routes are assumed for the forward model (Gazzola and Keysers 2009; Miall 2003): one is the corticocortical route, which is based on the connections from the ventral premotor cortex (vPM) (or macaque F5) to the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) (or macaque PF) and then to the STS; another is the…”
The roles of the temporal lobe in creative insight: an integrated review (2017, background): “…revealed to be essential to the mirror neural system, which consists of the IFG, the MTG, the cerebellum, and superior and inferior parietal areas (Gazzola & Keysers, 2009; Uddin, Clare Kelly, Biswal, Xavier Castellanos, & Milham, 2009), and is connected with a multitude of brain regions within…”
The role of prediction in social neuroscience (2012, background): “Numerous fMRI studies have confirmed this overlap showing activation of SII, but more significant activation of BA2 during action observation (Grezes et al., 2003; Dinstein et al., 2007; Gazzola et al., 2007; Gazzola and Keysers, 2009; Turella et al., 2009).”