Faculty Opinions recommendation of Single-neuron responses in humans during execution and observation of actions.

Mental Simulation of Facial Expressions: Mu Suppression to the Viewing of Dynamic Neutral Face Videos

“…Based on recent findings from connectivity research (see, for example, Gardner et al, 2015), our last explanation argues that rather than a global increase/decrease of activity in the totality of the network, a differential modulation of the signaling between the key MNN nodes is more likely to be at work during action observation. There is evidence for the existence of a subgroup of neurons in the human supplementary motor area that is excited by execution, but inhibited by observation of hand grasping actions and facial emotional expressions (Mukamel et al, 2010). These observation-inhibited neurons may be the mechanism for self-other discrimination process related to observing others’ actions, and the strength of their activity may modulate the amount of input from premotor areas to the sensorimotor cortex during action observation (Mukamel et al, 2010; Woodruff et al, 2011).…”

“…There is evidence for the existence of a subgroup of neurons in the human supplementary motor area that is excited by execution, but inhibited by observation of hand grasping actions and facial emotional expressions (Mukamel et al, 2010). These observation-inhibited neurons may be the mechanism for self-other discrimination process related to observing others’ actions, and the strength of their activity may modulate the amount of input from premotor areas to the sensorimotor cortex during action observation (Mukamel et al, 2010; Woodruff et al, 2011). Readily recognizable emotion-related information may activate the observation-inhibited mirror neurons in the premotor areas, leading to less excitatory input to the sensorimotor cortex.…”

“…The implication of these findings was that the mirror neurons could be coding the representations of the actions, allowing for recognizing the movements involved in an action and inferring the intention behind the action. Evidence for a similar mirroring mechanism in the human brain has come from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) studies (Caspers et al, 2010; Molenberghs et al, 2012) as well as single neuron recordings during surgery in humans (Mukamel et al, 2010).…”