Neural Circuits Underlying Imitation Learning of Hand Actions: An Event-Related fMRI Study

TL;DR: The mirror-neuron mechanism appears to play a fundamental role in both action understanding and imitation as mentioned in this paper, which is at the basis of human culture and ability to learn by imitation.

TL;DR: The hypothesis that gaze following is "hard-wired" in the brain, and may be localized within a circuit linking the superior temporal sulcus, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex is discussed.

TL;DR: It is concluded that, although there are several mechanisms through which one can understand the behaviour of other individuals, the parieto-frontal mechanism is the only one that allows an individual to understand the action of others 'from the inside' and gives the observer a first-person grasp of the motor goals and intentions of other Individuals.

TL;DR: There is a convergence between cognitive models of imitation, constructs derived from social psychology studies on mimicry and empathy, and recent empirical findings from the neurosciences that suggest that experience-based Hebbian learning forms links between sensory processing of the actions of others and motor plans.

TL;DR: Two areas with activation properties that become active during finger movement, regardless of how it is evoked, and their activation should increase when the same movement is elicited by the observation of an identical movement made by another individual are found.

TL;DR: Single-cell recordings in monkeys, and neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies in humans, reveal that cerebral cortex in and near the superior temporal sulcus (STS) region is an important component of this perceptual system.

TL;DR: It is concluded that in humans there is a system matching action observation and execution that resembles the one recently described in the monkey.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to localize brain areas that were active during the observation of actions made by another individual, including object-related and non-object-related actions made with different effectors.