Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Soc Neurosci. 2011;6(4):388-97. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2011.559129.
The discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys, and the finding of motor activity during action observation in humans are generally regarded to support motor theories of action understanding. These theories take motor resonance to be essential in the understanding of observed actions and the inference of action goals. However, the notions of "resonance," "action understanding," and "action goal" appear to be used ambiguously in the literature. A survey of the literature on mirror neurons and motor resonance yields two different interpretations of the term "resonance," three different interpretations of action understanding, and again three different interpretations of what the goal of an action is. This entails that, unless it is specified what interpretation is used, the meaning of any statement about the relation between these concepts can differ to a great extent. By discussing an experiment we will show that more precise definitions and use of the concepts will allow for better assessments of motor theories of action understanding and hence a more fruitful scientific debate. Lastly, we will provide an example of how the discussed experimental setup could be adapted to test other interpretations of the concepts.
猴子的镜像神经元的发现，以及人类在观察动作时运动活动的发现，通常被认为支持动作理解的运动理论。这些理论认为运动共鸣对于理解观察到的动作和推断动作目标至关重要。然而，在文献中，“共鸣”、“动作理解”和“动作目标”的概念似乎被混淆使用。对镜像神经元和运动共鸣的文献进行调查，得出了对“共鸣”一词的两种不同解释、对动作理解的三种不同解释，以及对动作目标的三种不同解释。这意味着，除非指定使用哪种解释，否则关于这些概念之间关系的任何陈述的含义可能会有很大差异。通过讨论一个实验，我们将表明，对概念进行更精确的定义和使用将允许更好地评估动作理解的运动理论，从而进行更富有成效的科学辩论。最后，我们将提供一个示例，说明如何调整讨论中的实验设置来测试这些概念的其他解释。
