1,721,211 research outputs found
A unifying view of the basis of social cognition
No full textIn this article we provide a unifying neural hypothesis on how individuals understand the actions and emotions of others. Our main claim is that the fundamental mechanism at the basis of the experiential understanding of others' actions is the activation of the mirror neuron system. A similar mechanism, but involving the activation of viscero-motor centers, underlies the experiential understanding of the emotions of others
Somatosensory cortex in action observation, a combined fMRI and cTBS study
No full textThe action observation-execution network (AOEN; Caspers et al., 2010; Molenberghs et al., 2012) includes premotor and parietal areas activated by both action execution and observation. Keysers et al. (2010) suggested the primary somatosensory area (SI) also participates in the AOEN, by simulating the somatosensory consequences of the observed action, a prediction supported by the fact that interfering with SI activation impairs action observation (Valchev et al., submitted). We examined, whether SI and the parieto-frontal AOEN are in fact a single, causally interconnected sensorimotor network, or two independent networks processing observed actions separately. To this aim, we combined continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) with fMRI to perturb SI and measure the effects on the rest of the AOEN.
Results show that cTBS-induced changes in SI predicted changes in premotor Obs activation and cTBS stimulation over SI seems to have a distal causal effect on premotor and parietal regions of the AOEN. Using acombination of cTBS and fMRI we show that SI is an active component of the AOEN that has causal effects on premotor regions classically associated with the mirror neuron system as measured in monkey (Gallese et al., 1996)
The anthropomorphic brain: the mirror neuron system responds to human and robotic actions.
No full textThe mirror neuron system: New frontiers
No full textSince the discovery of mirror neurons, much effort has been invested into Studying their location and properties in the human brain. Here we review these original findings and introduce the Main topics of this special issue of Social Neuroscience. What does the mirror system code? How is the mirror system embedded into the mosaic of circuits that compose out brain? How does the mirror system contribute to communication, language and social interaction? Call the principle of mirror neuron,, be extended to emotions, sensations and thoughts? Papers using a wide range of methods, including single cell recordings, fMRI, TMS, EEG and psychophysics, collected in this special issue, start to give us some impressive answers
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
A touching sight: SII/PV activation during the observation and experience of touch
No full textWatching the movie scene in which a tarantula crawls on James Bond's chest can make us literally shiver-as if the spider crawled on our own chest. What neural mechanisms are responsible for this "tactile empathy"? The observation of the actions of others activates the premotor cortex normally involved in the execution of the same actions. If a similar mechanism applies to the sight of touch, movies depicting touch should automatically activate the somatosensory cortex of the observer. Here we found using fMRI that the secondary but not the primary somatosensory cortex is activated both when the participants were touched and when they observed someone or something else getting touched by objects. The neural mechanisms enabling our own sensation of touch may therefore be a window also to our understanding of touch
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