Mirror neurons

Abstract

The mirror neurons were initially described in the rhesus monkey's premotor cortex. Characteristically, the firing rate of mirror neurons increases not only during performance of a goal-directed action, but also when the animal is observing a similar action performed by another subject. These results led to the hypothesis that mirror neurons are components of a circuit involved with providing information crucial to social interactions, such as intention recognition, and that its malfunctioning could underlie social inabilities characteristic of autism, for instance. In this review, we propose a new methodology to study the mirror neuron system (MNS) in humans, based on measurements of manual reaction times during handedness recognition tasks.