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Abstract:
Mirror Neurons (MN) have been suggested to be the supporting neural mechanism for action recognition and understanding. However, there is a current debate
about the localization of MN in humans. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies using repetition suppression (RS) paradigms for the identification of
MN provide mixed results. Studies supporting the existence of MN restricted their analysis to a-priori candidate regions, whereas studies that failed to find evidence
used non-object-directed actions. In the present fMRI study, we tackled these limitations by using object-directed actions in a RS paradigm and performing a wholebrain
analysis. Subjects observed and executed simple grasping movements differing only in their goal-directness (grasping a button vs. grasping beside it). MN areas
should be (1) more activated by goal-directed actions and (2) exhibit RS between execution and observation of the same action. The analysis revealed three significant
cortical clusters in the right anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS), right primary somatosensory cortex and left premotor cortex that show these characteristics. While
the aIPS has been reported before as a possible region for MN, the other two clusters havent been associated with MN directly yet using RS paradigms. We discuss
the potential contribution of these regions to object-directed actions.
