Mirror Neurons and Social Cognition: An Expanded Simulationist Framework

There are important structural similarities in the way that animals and humans engage in unreflective activities, including unreflective social interactions in the case of higher animals. Firstly, it is a form of unreflective embodied intelligence that is ‘motivated’ by the situation. Secondly, both humans and non-human animals are responsive to ‘affordances’ (Gibson 1979); to possibilities for action offered by an environment. Thirdly, both humans and animals are selectively responsive to one affordance rather than another. Social affordances are a subcategory of affordances, namely possibilities for social interaction offered by an environment: a friend’s sad face invites comforting behavior, a person waiting for a coffee machine can afford a conversation, and an extended hand affords a handshake. I will review recent insights in the nature of the bodily intentionality characteristic of unreflective action. Such ‘motor intentionality’ can be characterized as “our direct bodily inclination to act in a situated, environmental context” (Kelly 2005, p. 106). Standard interpretations of bodily intentionality see grasping an object as the paradigmatic example of motor intentionality. I will discuss the implications of another, novel perspective that emphasizes the importance of unreflective switches from one activity to another (Rietveld 2004) and understands bodily intentionality in terms of adequate responsiveness to a field of relevant affordances. In the final section I will discuss some implications for cognitive neuroscientists who use empirical findings related to the ‘mirror neuron system’ as a starting point for a theory of motor intentionality and social cognition. Keywords: embodied cognition; enaction; motor intentionality; affective cognition; field of affordances

Ever since the discovery of mirror neurons in the ventral premotor cortex (area F5) of the macaque brain, in the late 1980s, by Rizzolatti and his University of Parma colleagues, the question was put forward whether the same type of neurons could be found in the human brain. Could it be possible that these same neurons that activate not only when the monkey reaches for or takes a bite out of some sort of food -like a nut or a raisin- but also when someone picks it up to hand it to the monkey, be found in our brains? This essay does not have the scope to consider all concepts of empathy nor to include all relevant studies on mirror neurons concerning its relation to empathy. That being so, I shall take the following path: 1) introduce mirror neurons, what they are, where they are and their implications; 2) consider some aspects of empathy from different areas of research and present Edith Stein and Theodor Lipps's ideas; 3) relate the philosophers' ideas with the discussion put forward by Iacoboni, Gallese, Rizzolatti and Ramachandran concerning mirror neurons and empathy.

The finding of mirror neurons (MNs) has provided a biological substrate to a new concept of cognition, relating data on actions and perceptions not only to integrate perception in action planning and execution but also as a neural mechanism supporting a wide range of cognitive functions. Here we first summarize data on MN localization and role in primates, then we report findings in normal human subjects: functional magnetic resonance imaging and neurophysiological studies sustain that MNs have a role in motor learning and recognizing actions and intentions of others, and they also support an embodied view of language, empathy, and memory. Then, we detail the results of literature searching on MNs and embodied cognition in Parkinson's disease (PD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD)/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and in mild cognitive impairment (MCI)/Alzheimer's disease (AD). In PD the network of MN could be altered, but its hyperactivation might support motor and cognitive performances at least in early stages. In the ALS/FTD continuum, preliminary evidence points out to an involvement of the MN network, which could explain language and inter-subjectivity deficits shown in patients affected by these clinical entities. In the MCI/AD spectrum, a few recent studies suggest a possible progressive involvement from posterior to anterior areas of the MN network, with the brain putting in place compensatory mechanisms in early stages. Reinterpreting neurodegenerative diseases at the light of the new views about brain organization stemming from the discovery of MN could help to better comprehend clinical manifestations and open new pathways to rehabilitation.

In this paper, I examine the relationship between social cognition and religious cognition. Many cognitive theories of religion claim that these two forms are somehow related, but the details are usually left unexplored and insights from theories of social cognition are not taken on board. I discuss the three main (groups of) theories of social cognition, namely the theory-theory, the simulation theory and enactivist theories. Secondly, I explore how these theories can help to enrich a number of cognitive theories of religion. The theories I discuss are Stewart Guthrie’s anthropomorphism, Justin Barrett’s hyperactive agency detection device, Jesse Bering’s existential theory of mind, Pascal Boyer’s minds with full strategic access and Tanya Luhrmann’s porous theory of mind. Finally, I look at how enrichment with insights from social cognition can help to combine different existing theories of religious cognition into a unified framework.

Watch your favorite athlete take a shot for the goal, or your favorite actor lean in for a kiss, and chances are that some of the same neurons that would be active if you were performing that action are firing as well. These mirror neurons – neurons in premotor and parietal cortex that fire both when an animal performs a goal-directed action and when observing such actions – provide a link between representations of the other and selfrepresentations (di Pellegrino et al., 1992). Along with their proximity to Broca’s area, this has led to the suggestion that the mirror system is fundamental for the development of language and complex social-cognitive constructs including empathy and theory of mind (Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006). But how does the mirror system acquire its reflective properties? Are the patterns it shows in response to observing a particular movement pre-set by evolution, or the product of experience? In this issue, Catmur et al. address this question by using fMRI to assess activation patterns within the mirror system after sensorimotor training. They first trained participants to either flex their hand when they saw a picture of a flexed hand and flex their foot in response to the picture of a flexed foot (Compatible condition), or to reverse their responses (Incompatible condition; flex hand in response to foot picture and vice versa). Following training, participants were scanned while simply observing pictures of flexed hands or feet, while themselves remaining stationary. The results show that the mirror system can be trained: Areas that showed greater activity to hand-action displays for the Compatible group showed greater reactivity to foot-action displays in the Incompatible group. Both groups showed stronger activations for the stimuli that predicted performance of the hand action, suggesting some pre-existing bias towards the representation of such actions. However, the critical finding is that the mirror system’s mapping to which stimuli predicted such movements was flexible, showing a complete reversal after only 3 days of training. It appears that the representations linking others’ actions and our own within the mirror system are not hardwired, but instead are easily changed. Is the mirroring system truly unique, or more properly seen as a special case of experience-based associations? Is the urge to make a kick while watching a player do so during a televised game that different from ‘feeling it in your bones’ when you visit the soccer field you frequented in your youth? The results of Catmur et al. suggest that it may not be: In both cases mirror neurons may be responding to the experienced relationship between those cues and the motor programs you have used during a game. The links between the mirror system and more traditional learning and memory principles have important implications. As described above, the mirror system is thought to be fundamental to empathy and social cognition, and disruptions in it may be related to autism, schizophrenia, and other disorders. The possibility of a trainable mirror system opens the door to treatments that ‘iron out’ such distortions.

The observation of actions performed by another person activates parts of the brain as if the observer were performing that action, referred to as the ‘mirror system’. Very little is currently known about the developmental trajectory of the mirror system and related social cognitive processes. This experimental study sought to explore the modulation of the sensorimotor mu rhythm during action observation using EEG measures, and how these may relate to social cognitive abilities across the lifespan, from late childhood through to old age. Three-hundred and one participants aged 10- to 86-years-old completed an action observation EEG task and three additional explicit measures of social cognition. As predicted, findings show enhanced sensorimotor alpha and beta desynchronization during hand action observation as compared to static hand observation. Overall, our findings indicate that the reactivity of the sensorimotor mu rhythm to the observation of others’ actions increases throughout the lifespan, independently from social cognitive processes.

No evidence for mirror system dysfunction in schizophrenia from a multimodal TMS/EEG study

  When the music moves you, you dance. The bodily movement that develops in response to music is what is here considered “dance.” Philosophers have long understood music as possessing the power to move us. This paper employs Heinrich Wolfflin’s theory of “sympathetic modeling”—a theory recently validated by neuroscientists’ discovery of mirror neurons in humans—and Antonio Damasio’s neurobiological model of emotion to establish the mediating links between music and the bodily movements made in response. The first “motion” elicited by hearing music is, as Wolfflin suggested, an unconscious “sympathetic modeling,” an internal vocalization of what is heard; this activity involves muscular expansions and contractions. Signals of muscle movement are relayed to the brain by receptor cells imbedded in the muscles. In complex responses, the brain receives patterns of movement from throughout the entire body. When these whole-body kinesthetic sensations are made conscious as perceptions of a unified self, they enter awareness as subjectively felt emotion: the felt response to music. Such patterns of muscular stretching can be abstracted from the sort of external experience that produces emotion in ordinary life experience and reproduced at will. Thus, a dancer, by deliberately reproducing a pattern of muscle stretching, can re-create a chosen specific emotion. This activity constitutes “expressing” emotion in bodily movement. Performed in response to the emotion elicited by music, it is the expressive gesture of dance. One viewing the dance “understands” the emotion expressed by, once again, employing sympathetic modeling to reconstruct the internal pattern of movement associated with that emotion. In popular, social, dancing, dancers model one another’s movements and, together, model the muscle tension patterns of particular rhythms and melodic lines; this situation is easily accounted for by what is now known about mirror neurons. Neuroscience thus explains what happens when the music moves you.   Key words: Emotion, movement, music, dance, aesthetics, neuroscience.

The visual recognition of goal-directed movements is crucial for the learning of actions, and possibly for the understanding of the intentions and goals of others. The discovery of mirror neurons has stimulated a vast amount of research investigating possible links between action perception and action execution [1,2]. However, it remains largely unknown what is the real extent of this putative visuo-motor interaction during visual perception of actions and which relevant computational functions are instead accomplished by possibly purely visual processing.

Functional imaging of face and hand imitation: towards a motor theory of empathy

Using social Cognitive theory to reengage dormant users in question and answer Communities: A case study of active StackOverflow participants

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often proposed to be the condition of atypical social cognition, because the social behaviours observed in ASD can be attributed to a range of atypicalities in underlying social cognitive processing. This chapter presents and critiques the most prominent social cognitive theories. We suggest that the ‘Theory of Mind’ theory of autism—which proposes that autistic social atypicalities are best explained by difficulties in inferring the mental states of other people—continues to be the most compelling social cognitive theory, with the greatest explanatory power. We also reflect upon ongoing issues that stymy our understanding of the social cognitive underpinnings of ASD, including heterogeneity, co-occurring conditions, and compensatory ability. Finally, the chapter touches on ongoing debates in the field and suggests avenues for future research required to facilitate knowledge of autistic social behaviour and cognition across the whole lifespan.

为考察人际距离对自我-他人表征的影响，采用金钱博弈任务检测了在自己操作、观察朋友操作和观察陌生同学操作时的脑电成分反馈相关负波（FRN）。结果发现，观察任务产生了类似于自我操作时输钱反馈的负偏向，即观察者反馈负波（oFRN）；在观察条件下，被试自评与朋友的亲近程度高于同学（p＆lt;0.001），两者引起的oFRN达到边缘显著性水平（p=0.062），亲近程度与oFRN呈显著相关（p=0.041）。前者说明自我和他人具有相似表征，后者则反映了自我对他人信息表征的替代性体验可能受人际距离所调节。

The study of the role of mirror neurons in cognitive processes is a pressing problem of modern neuroscience. It is believed that mirror neurons are involved in understanding the goals and intentions of others, in motor imitation and motor learning, motor mimicry, in the implementation of higher cognitive functions (in learning and memory, empathy, social cognition, self-awareness, the formation of a model of the mental state of another person and the implementation of speech), in the perception of time and emotions, emotional communication. However, the origin of mirror neurons remains an open question. Some researchers believe that the mirror neuron system is not an innate mechanism, but is the result of learning. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis about the important role of learning in the formation of the mirror neuron system. Methods. The study involved young men and women: monolinguals with an English proficiency level of A1 (elementary) or A2 (pre-intermediate) on the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) scale and bilinguals with an English proficiency level of B2 (upper intermediate) or C1 (advanced). Type of bilingualism: sequential and artificial. The participants in the experiment either silently pronounced emotional («PAIN») and unemotional words («ONE») in their native (Russian) and non-native (English) languages with their lips alone, or watched the operator pronounce the same words. The words were pronounced by the operator or the subject at the moments when the stopwatch hand on the monitor screen moved through the divisions of 0, 5, 10, etc. seconds. In this case, the stopwatch hand made 5 revolutions. Before and during the activity, the participants’ EEG was recorded monopolarly using a 24-channel encephalograph-analyzer «Encephalan-131-03» in the frontal (F3, F4, Fz, F7, F8), central (C3, C4, Cz), temporal (T3, T4, T5, T6), parietal (P3, P4, Pz) and occipital (O1, O2) leads according to the «10–20 %» system. Leads A1 and A2 were used as referents. When processing the obtained data, spectral power estimates were calculated on short segments of the EEG recording (1.5 s) free of artifacts: 1.5 seconds before the stopwatch arrow crossed the corresponding division (the «preparation» stage for the action), immediately after the stopwatch arrow crossed the division (the «execution» stage of the action) and 1.5 seconds after the stopwatch arrow crossed the division (the «background» stage). The obtained spectral power values were averaged separately for each stage of the activity, for each series and for all subjects. The «MatLab v6.5» package and the Wilcoxon test for related samples were used for statistical data processing. Results. Bilinguals (men and women) showed a more pronounced decrease in the spectral power of the mu rhythm when observing and pronouncing emotional and non-emotional words in their native and non-native languages compared to monolinguals (men and women), which indicates a more significant activation of «communicative» mirror neurons in bilinguals. Conclusion. It is assumed that the detected intergroup differences in the activation of mirror neurons are due to the fact that the acquisition of a second language was accompanied by an increase in the number of «communicative» mirror neurons in the corresponding areas of the cortex due to neurogenesis in bilinguals. The results obtained indicate an important role of learning in the formation of the mirror neuron system. However, this does not exclude the possible influence of hereditary factors on this process.

The article is devoted to a new approach to the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) by revealing and applying in practice the laws of functioning of mirror neurons that can activate the synchronous perception of units of a non-native language. The human mirror neuron system functions by mapping perceived actions directly to the motor system, observing and mimicking actions, and improving understanding of other people’s thoughts and actions through motor imitation. Mirror neurons play an important role in social cognition, copycat behavior, and understanding other people’s behavior. In addition, mirror neurons contribute to a person’s ability to acquire new skills, understand intentions, and interpret verbal and non-verbal components of language. There are three distinct components of empathy: motor, emotional, and cognitive, directly dependent on mirror neuron function. Learning a foreign language is one of the most difficult human problems, because language activity occurs not only mechanically, but also mentally. This means that language activity is also associated with mental (brain) processes as well as with biological ones. In this regard, in our opinion, the study of a foreign language should rely on interdisciplinary research, in particular on neurobiological studies that reveal the essence of the work of mirror neurons in the cognitive aspect. The analysis of the functioning of mirror neurons is considered in the article on the analysis of typical errors made by Indonesian students in the RFL learning process, which reveal the mechanism of disturbances in the function of mirror neurons, which result in the occurrence of interferents of different tiers of the structure of the language. The proposed approach has great prospects in the methodology of teaching RFL to increase the efficiency of mastering Russian as a foreign language.