Tessitore Giovanni, Prevete Roberto, Catanzariti Ezio, Tamburrini Guglielmo
Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche, Università di Napoli Federico II, Via Cintia Monte S. Angelo, 80126, Naples, Italy.
Biol Cybern. 2010 Dec;103(6):471-85. doi: 10.1007/s00422-010-0415-5. Epub 2010 Dec 17.
Typical patterns of hand-joint covariation arising in the context of grasping actions enable one to provide simplified descriptions of these actions in terms of small sets of hand-joint parameters. The computational model of mirror mechanisms introduced here hypothesizes that mirror neurons are crucially involved in coding and making this simplified motor information available for both action recognition and control processes. In particular, grasping action recognition processes are modeled in terms of a visuo-motor loop enabling one to make iterated use of mirror-coded motor information. In simulation experiments concerning the classification of reach-to-grasp actions, mirror-coded information was found to simplify the processing of visual inputs and to improve action recognition results with respect to recognition procedures that are solely based on visual processing. The visuo-motor loop involved in action recognition is a distinctive feature of this model which is coherent with the direct matching hypothesis. Moreover, the visuo-motor loop sets the model introduced here apart from those computational models that identify mirror neuron activity in action observation with the final outcome of computational processes unidirectionally flowing from sensory (and usually visual) to motor systems.
在抓握动作情境中出现的典型手部关节协变模式，使人们能够依据少量手部关节参数对手部动作进行简化描述。这里引入的镜像机制计算模型假设，镜像神经元在编码并使这种简化的运动信息可用于动作识别和控制过程方面起着关键作用。具体而言，抓握动作识别过程是根据一个视觉-运动环路进行建模的，该环路使人们能够反复利用镜像编码的运动信息。在关于伸手抓握动作分类的模拟实验中，发现镜像编码信息简化了视觉输入的处理，并相对于仅基于视觉处理的识别程序提高了动作识别结果。动作识别中涉及的视觉-运动环路是该模型的一个显著特征，这与直接匹配假说相一致。此外，视觉-运动环路使这里引入的模型有别于那些在动作观察中识别镜像神经元活动，且将其与从感觉（通常是视觉）到运动系统单向流动的计算过程的最终结果联系起来的计算模型。
