Week 8 Lecture 8 - imitation and mirror neurons Flashcards
we can map visual representations of actions onto our motor system
What is this called?
Cross modal transfer
we can map visual representations of actions onto our motor system to produce what?
a copy of the action
What is perception-action mapping?
mapping visual representations
of actions onto our motor systems to produce a copy of the action
Humans are good at PAM, what might this suggest?
that this ability is innate
What is some developmental evidence for PAM?
- Infants can imitate caregiver’s facial expressions, hand and mouth movements, head turns, etc.
- Babies must build up a representation of the visual image of the caregiver’s face/mouth and map this onto their own motor representation of the movement
Meltzoff and Moore (1977) studied facial imitation in babies
What were the results?
- Babies aged 12 – 21 days could imitate certain facial expressions
- Imitate specific acts (i.e., lip protrusion vs. tongue protrusion) not just whole
body parts even after a delay
What evidence is there against neonate imitation?
- Longitudinal study - 1, 3, 6, and 9 weeks
- Large number of alternative control model behaviours
- Behaviour matching model more likely compared to some but not other control
behaviours - Tongue protrusion may be elicited by observing faces
True imitation may emerge later (6-9 months) as proposed by Piaget (who proposed it occurred at 1 year)
What is Active Intermodal Matching (AIM)?
- Neonates recognise equivalences between body transformations they see and those of their own body that they ‘feel’ themselves make
- Baby’s emotional expressions induce adults to produce similar expressions, which provides the infant with a
visual input to match his motor
output
What does AIM involve?
- perception and action having independent coding/representation
- A “specialist” module for imitation
What do alternative models to AIM such as IM and ASL posit?
- Common coding for perception and action
- Imitation part of “generalist” processes for motor control and learning
What is Ideomotor (IM) theory?
- suggests that actions are represented by their perceivable effects.
- Thus, any activation of the effect image, either endogenously or exogenously, will trigger the corresponding action.
What is Associative Sequence Learning (ASL)?
- emphasises learning through experience; - e.g. see consequence of own hand action
What is the Dual route model of imitation?
- Incorporates aspects of the other models
- Semantic route –meaningful actions, stored in repertoire (draws on own stored actions, would copy in your own way)
- Visuomotor/direct route –meaningless actions (unknown actions which you would copy carefully) –> mirror neurons
What are some general properties of mirror neurons?
- Bimodal, visuo-motor neurons (i.e., respond to both visual and motor stimuli)
- Discharge when individual performs an
action and when they observe the same
action performed by another individual
How do mirror neurons underpin action understanding?
Umiltà et al. (2001):
- Mirror neurons active during observation of partially hidden actions (predicts action
outcome even in absence of complete visual information)
Kohler et al. (2002):
- Audio-visual mirror neurons respond
to the sound typically produced by the action
