Mirror Neurons Flashcards
Mirror neurons show activity when?
Someone performs an action
Someone observes someone else perform similar action
Where are mirror neurons found?
Ventral premotor cortex and inferior parietal lobe
Insula and rostral cingulate
Prefrontal cortex and language areas
What area of mirror neurons encodes emotional situations?
Insula and rostral cingulate
What area of MNs encodes sensory representation of observed or heard motor acts?
Ventral premotor cortex and inferior parietal lobe
What area of MNs encode motor imitation or sounds?
Prefrontal cortex and language areas
In monkeys ventral premotor cortex, the same neurons fired when?
monkey grapsed food
experimenter or another monkey grapsed food
When monkey, saw or heard motor act or when motor act when partially hidden
The inferior parietal lobe brain area:
does not directly control movements
DOES receive inputs from superior temporal sulcus
DOES produce outputs to premotor cortex
Action intention areas in humans include:
Inferior and middle frontal gyrus Inferior and superior parietal lobe inferior temoral gyrus cerebellum ventral premotor area
Empathetic/emotion areas in humans include:
Cingulate gyrus
Insula
Amygdala
Young children and apes can? And cannot?
Can:
Selectively attend to faces, bodies and actions
Understand basic mental states such as goals and perceptions
understand interactions between two objects
Cannot:
distinguish between the object of a mental state and to content of a mental state - theory of mind
understand interactions between 3 objects
Humans older than 3-4 years develop these abilities
Similar motor action in scenes suggestive of different contexts was associated with…
Increased activity in right inferior posterior frontal gyrus
Empathetic subjects have
higher levels of activity in MNS when viewing motions or hearing sounds
Better imitation of emotional expression of others
ASD involves:
motor deficits
language impairment
Social impairment
Decreased activity of MNs
If shown biting action what area of the brain will be activated (human)
Shown images of monkey, dogs and humans = increased activity in the inferior parietal lobe and the ventral premotor cortex
What communicative actions produced premotor activity in the human brain?
Lip smacking - monkey
speech - human
no activity was shown when dogs were displayed barking. Hence other species actions are recognised without motor mapping
