The Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, IoN, UCL, 12 Queen Square, London, UK.
Eur J Neurosci. 2010 Nov;32(10):1765-70. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010.07435.x. Epub 2010 Oct 19.
In the last decade there has been a great amount of research investigating the role of simulation in our ability to infer the underlying intentions of any observed action. The majority of studies have focussed on the role of mirror neurons and the network of cortical areas active during action observation (AON) in inferring the goal of an observed action. However, it remains unclear what precisely is simulated when we observe an action and how such simulations can enable the observer to infer the underlying intention of that action. In particular it is not known how simulation in the AON enables the inference of the same goal when the kinematics observed to achieve that goal differ, such as when reaching to grasp an object with the left or right hands. Here we performed a behavioural study with healthy human subjects to address this question. We show that the subjects were able to detect very subtle changes in the kinematics of an observed action. In addition, we fitted the behavioural responses with a model based on the predictive coding account of mirror neurons. This is a Bayesian account of action observation that can be explained by the free-energy principle. Here we show that we can model all the effects observed when the action observation system is considered within a predictive coding framework.
在过去的十年中，大量的研究调查了模拟在我们推断任何观察到的行为的潜在意图的能力中的作用。大多数研究都集中在镜像神经元的作用以及在动作观察期间活跃的皮质区域网络（AON）在推断观察到的动作的目标中的作用。然而，当我们观察一个动作时，究竟模拟了什么，以及这种模拟如何使观察者能够推断出该动作的潜在意图，仍然不清楚。特别是，当观察到的实现目标的运动学不同时，例如用左手或右手伸手去抓一个物体时，AON 中的模拟如何能够推断出相同的目标，这一点还不清楚。在这里，我们进行了一项健康人类受试者的行为研究来解决这个问题。我们表明，受试者能够检测到观察到的动作的运动学中非常细微的变化。此外，我们根据镜像神经元的预测编码理论对行为反应进行了拟合。这是一种基于动作观察的贝叶斯理论，可以用自由能原理来解释。在这里，我们表明，当我们在预测编码框架内考虑动作观察系统时，我们可以模拟所有观察到的效果。
