Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London SE1 1UL, UK; Department of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK.
Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London SE1 1UL, UK.
Cognition. 2018 Feb;171:10-14. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.10.024. Epub 2017 Dec 11.
The discovery of 'mirror' neurons stimulated intense interest in the role of motor processes in social interaction. A popular assumption is that observation-related motor activation, exemplified by mirror neurons' matching properties, evolved to subserve the 'understanding' of others' actions. Alternatively, such motor activation may result from sensorimotor learning. Sensorimotor training alters observation-related motor activation, but studies demonstrating training-dependent changes in motor activation have not addressed the functional role of such activation. We therefore tested whether sensorimotor learning alters action understanding. Participants completed an action understanding task, judging the weight of boxes lifted by another person, before and after 'counter-mirror' sensorimotor training. During this training they lifted heavy boxes while observing light boxes being lifted, and vice-versa. Compared to a control group, this training significantly reduced participants' action understanding ability. Performance on a duration judgement task was unaffected by training. These data suggest the ability to understand others' actions results from sensorimotor learning.
镜像神经元的发现激发了人们对运动过程在社会互动中作用的浓厚兴趣。一个流行的假设是，与观察相关的运动激活，如镜像神经元的匹配特性，是为了促进对他人行为的“理解”而进化的。或者，这种运动激活可能是由感觉运动学习引起的。感觉运动训练改变了与观察相关的运动激活，但证明运动激活的训练依赖性变化的研究并没有解决这种激活的功能作用。因此，我们测试了感觉运动学习是否会改变对动作的理解。参与者在进行“反镜像”感觉运动训练之前和之后，完成了一个动作理解任务，判断另一个人举起的盒子的重量。在训练过程中，他们举起重盒子，同时观察轻盒子被举起，反之亦然。与对照组相比，这种训练显著降低了参与者的动作理解能力。训练对时长判断任务的表现没有影响。这些数据表明，理解他人行为的能力来自于感觉运动学习。
