An investigation of auditory contagious yawning

Bridging a yawning chasm: EEG investigations into the debate concerning the role of the human mirror neuron system in contagious yawning

“…This is in agreement with Arnott et al (2009), but not with other fMRI studies that have argued against hMNS involvement in contagious yawning (Nahab et al, 2009;Platek et al, 2005;Schürmann et al, 2005) or that showed no further increase in hMNS activation in comparison to control conditions (Nahab et al, 2009;Schürmann et al, 2005). Arnott et al previously proposed that one possible reason why previous investigations have failed to observe the specific involvement of hMNS during yawn observation was their choice of control stimuli that would also activate the hMNS.…”

“…Alternatively, changes in neural synchrony (and, hence, in the EEG signal) can occur without large changes in cortical energy consumption (Hari, 1996;Hari et al, 1998), so the differences in findings between the present study and the three previous fMRI studies cited above may simply result from the fact that EEG and fMRI can measure different expressions of activation. In a third experiment, we set out to investigate whether EEG was also a suitable tool to examine the relationship between contagious yawning and the hMNS when using auditory stimuli similar to those employed by Arnott et al (2009).…”

“…Levels of autistic traits were measured using the AQ (Baron-Cohen et al, 2001). The experimental stimuli were either 3-s-long auditory recordings of people yawning or electronically scrambled versions of the yawns that served as control stimuli (see Arnott et al, 2009). We used a total of 14 different stimuli (7 yawns and 7 scrambled stimuli).…”

“…Unique activation to yawns was observed in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which was positively correlated with the urge to yawn; activation common to all stimuli was noted in hMNS areas. The only neuroimaging study to date to find evidence of specific hMNS involvement in contagious yawning has come from Arnott, Singhal, and Goodale (2009). Using an auditory paradigm, they contrasted the sound of yawns with electronically scrambled versions of the same stimuli.…”

“…In Experiments 1 and 2, we used visually presented videos of yawns and gapes. Then, Experiment 3 was a constructive replication of Arnott et al (2009) using auditory stimuli. Given Arnott et al's findings of right inferior frontal hMNS activation during yawns, we focused our analyses on analogous areas (i.e., the right FC and C electrode strips).…”