Tai Yen F, Scherfler Christoph, Brooks David J, Sawamoto Nobukatsu, Castiello Umberto
Division of Neuroscience, Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre, Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College, London W12 0NN, United Kingdom.
Curr Biol. 2004 Jan 20;14(2):117-20. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2004.01.005.
Previous work has shown that both human adults and children attend to grasping actions performed by another person but not necessarily to those made by a mechanical device. According to recent neurophysiological data, the monkey premotor cortex contains "mirror" neurons that discharge both when the monkey performs specific manual grasping actions and when it observes another individual performing the same or similar actions. However, when a human model uses tools to perform grasping actions, the mirror neurons are not activated. A similar "mirror" system has been described in humans, but whether or not it is also tuned specifically to biological actions has never been tested. Here we show that when subjects observed manual grasping actions performed by a human model a significant neural response was elicited in the left premotor cortex. This activation was not evident for the observation of grasping actions performed by a robot model commanded by an experimenter. This result indicates for the first time that in humans the mirror system is biologically tuned. This system appears to be the neural substrate for biological preference during action coding.
先前的研究表明，无论是成年人还是儿童，都会关注他人执行的抓握动作，但不一定会关注机械装置执行的动作。根据最近的神经生理学数据，猴子的前运动皮层包含“镜像”神经元，当猴子执行特定的手动抓握动作时以及当它观察到另一个个体执行相同或相似动作时，这些神经元都会放电。然而，当一个人类模型使用工具执行抓握动作时，镜像神经元不会被激活。在人类中也描述了类似的“镜像”系统，但它是否也专门针对生物动作进行调整从未得到过测试。在这里，我们表明，当受试者观察人类模型执行的手动抓握动作时，左前运动皮层会引发显著的神经反应。对于观察由实验者指挥的机器人模型执行的抓握动作，这种激活并不明显。这一结果首次表明，在人类中，镜像系统是经过生物调整的。该系统似乎是动作编码过程中生物偏好的神经基础。
