Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Essex, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Neuroimage. 2021 Jul 1;234:117848. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.117848. Epub 2021 Feb 11.
Sensorimotor alpha suppression is present both during the observation and execution of actions, and is a commonly used tool to investigate neural mirroring in infancy. Köster et al. (2020) used this measure to investigate infants' motor cortex activation during the observation of action demonstrations and its relationship to subsequent imitation of these actions. Contrary to what is implied in the paper and to common findings in the literature, the study's results appear to suggest that the motor system was deactivated during the observation of the actions, and that greater deactivation during action observation was associated with a greater tendency to copy the action. Here we present potential methodological explanations for these unexpected findings and discuss them in relation to common recommendations in the field.
感觉运动α抑制在观察和执行动作时都会出现，是一种常用于研究婴儿神经镜像的常用工具。Köster 等人（2020 年）使用该测量方法来研究婴儿在观察动作示范时运动皮层的激活情况及其与后续模仿这些动作的关系。与该论文中所暗示的以及文献中的常见发现相反，该研究的结果似乎表明，在观察动作时运动系统被去激活了，并且在动作观察过程中更大的去激活与更大的复制动作的倾向相关。在这里，我们为这些意外发现提供了潜在的方法学解释，并结合该领域的常见建议进行了讨论。
