Department of Electronics and Bioinformatics, School of Science and Technology, Meiji University, Japan.
Brain Cogn. 2010 Apr;72(3):394-9. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2009.11.005. Epub 2009 Dec 23.
It is well established that several motor areas, called the mirror-neuron system (MNS), are activated when an individual observes other's actions. However, whether the MNS responds similarly to robotic actions compared with human actions is still controversial. The present study investigated whether and how the motor area activity is influenced by appearance (human vs. robot) and/or kinematics (human vs. robot) of the observed action using near-infrared spectroscopy. The results showed that there was a strong interaction between these factors, revealing strong deactivations in sensorimotor areas when the subject saw a human agent performing robotic actions, which was significantly different from responses when observing the human agent acting in a human way and the robot agent performing robotic actions. These results indicate that MNS activity is sensitive to congruency between the appearance and kinematics of the agent, especially when the agent has a human appearance. We discuss the experience-dependent characteristics of MNS sensitivity to observed actions.
已经证实，当个体观察他人的动作时，几个被称为镜像神经元系统（MNS）的运动区域会被激活。然而，MNS 是否对机器人动作的反应与对人类动作的反应相似，这仍然存在争议。本研究使用近红外光谱技术，探讨了运动区的活动是否以及如何受到观察到的动作的外观（人类与机器人）和/或运动学（人类与机器人）的影响。结果表明，这些因素之间存在强烈的相互作用，当主体看到人类代理执行机器人动作时，感觉运动区域会出现强烈的去激活，这与观察人类代理以人类方式和机器人代理执行机器人动作时的反应明显不同。这些结果表明，MNS 活动对代理的外观和运动学的一致性很敏感，尤其是当代理具有人类外观时。我们讨论了 MNS 对观察到的动作的敏感性的经验依赖性特征。
