Fu Yan, Franz Elizabeth A
Action, Brain and Cognition Laboratory and fMRIotago, William James Building, Level 4, Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, 9010, New Zealand,
Exp Brain Res. 2014 Nov;232(11):3665-74. doi: 10.1007/s00221-014-4042-6. Epub 2014 Aug 6.
A remarkable capability of the brain's action representation system is that neurons with 'mirroring' properties respond both when an agent (human or monkey) executes an action and also when the agent observes a similar action performed by someone else. Curiously, however, observed actions involve numerous viewer perspectives, whereas execution of actions occur with respect to 'self' coordinate space, and the mapping between viewer perspectives is not a known property of the so-called mirror neuron system (MNS). Toward a resolution of this paradox, we demonstrate in humans striking new evidence that key areas defined as part of the MNS of the frontal lobe, directly encode viewer perspective during action observation (Exps 1, 2). What is more, this property applies only to observation of embodied actions and not when disembodied movements of objects are observed (Exp 3). These findings raise the intriguing possibility that the MNS plays a critical role in the formation of action memories.
大脑动作表征系统的一个显著能力是，具有“镜像”特性的神经元在主体（人类或猴子）执行动作时以及在主体观察他人执行类似动作时都会做出反应。然而，奇怪的是，观察到的动作涉及众多观察者视角，而动作的执行是相对于“自我”坐标空间进行的，并且观察者视角之间的映射并非所谓镜像神经元系统（MNS）的已知特性。为了解决这一矛盾，我们在人类身上展示了惊人的新证据，即额叶中被定义为MNS一部分的关键区域，在动作观察期间直接编码观察者视角（实验1、2）。此外，这一特性仅适用于对具身动作的观察，而不适用于观察物体的非具身运动（实验3）。这些发现提出了一个有趣的可能性，即MNS在动作记忆的形成中起着关键作用。
