View-Based Encoding of Actions in Mirror Neurons of Area F5 in Macaque Premotor Cortex

Caggiano, Vittorio; Fogassi, Leonardo; Rizzolatti, Giacomo; Pomper, Joern K.; Thier, Peter; Giese, Martin A.; Casile, Antonino

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.12.022

Cited by 178 publications

(150 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…To observe an action in a third-person rather than a first-person perspective implies additional cognitive operations such as mental rotation and transformation of the perceptual appearance of the observed action into a correspondent motor plan. Interestingly, it has been recently demonstrated that observing an action from first-or third-person perspective can activate different subpopulations of mirror neurons in the ventral premotor cortex [42]. Furthermore, other neurophysiological studies showed that when two monkeys sitting near each other are allowed to interact in a competitive situation, parietal neurons present complex combinatorial responses to 'of self ' and 'other's' motion [43].…”

Section: Discussion (A) Individual Learning and Understanding Of The mentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual and social learning processes involved in the acquisition and generalization of tool use in macaques

Macellini

Maranesi

Bonini

et al. 2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Macaques can efficiently use several tools, but their capacity to discriminate the relevant physical features of a tool and the social factors contributing to their acquisition are still poorly explored. In a series of studies, we investigated macaques' ability to generalize the use of a stick as a tool to new objects having different physical features (study 1), or to new contexts, requiring them to adapt the previously learned motor strategy (study 2). We then assessed whether the observation of a skilled model might facilitate tool-use learning by naive observer monkeys (study 3). Results of study 1 and study 2 showed that monkeys trained to use a tool generalize this ability to tools of different shape and length, and learn to adapt their motor strategy to a new task. Study 3 demonstrated that observing a skilled model increases the observers' manipulations of a stick, thus facilitating the individual discovery of the relevant properties of this object as a tool. These findings support the view that in macaques, the motor system can be modified through tool use and that it has a limited capacity to adjust the learnt motor skills to a new context. Social factors, although important to facilitate the interaction with tools, are not crucial for tool-use learning.

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Section: Discussion (A) Individual Learning and Understanding Of The mentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual and social learning processes involved in the acquisition and generalization of tool use in macaques

Macellini

Maranesi

Bonini

et al. 2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…It also gives rise to predictions that can be tested empirically, for example by testing for selective adaptation in infants to mover events, testing whether manipulating hands are the first hand stimuli to be acquired, and possibly preferential looking at faces after looking at mover events. Physiologically, the model suggests that if monkeys are shown during development objects being moved consistently by an artificial mover device, representations of the artificial mover may become incorporated in hand-specific brain regions, possibly in the mirror system (45). Similarly, sufficient exposure to mover events by an artificial mover is predicted to promote hand-like expectations in infants (1, 3).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

Ullman

Harari

Dorfman

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Early in development, infants learn to solve visual problems that are highly challenging for current computational methods. We present a model that deals with two fundamental problems in which the gap between computational difficulty and infant learning is particularly striking: learning to recognize hands and learning to recognize gaze direction. The model is shown a stream of natural videos and learns without any supervision to detect human hands by appearance and by context, as well as direction of gaze, in complex natural scenes. The algorithm is guided by an empirically motivated innate mechanism-the detection of "mover" events in dynamic images, which are the events of a moving image region causing a stationary region to move or change after contact. Mover events provide an internal teaching signal, which is shown to be more effective than alternative cues and sufficient for the efficient acquisition of hand and gaze representations. The implications go beyond the specific tasks, by showing how domain-specific "proto concepts" can guide the system to acquire meaningful concepts, which are significant to the observer but statistically inconspicuous in the sensory input.A basic question in cognitive development is how we learn to understand the world on the basis of sensory perception and active exploration. Already in their first months of life, infants rapidly learn to recognize complex objects and events in their visual input (1-3). Probabilistic learning models, as well as connectionist and dynamical models, have been developed in recent years as powerful tools for extracting the unobserved causes of sensory signals (4-6). Some of these models can efficiently discover significant statistical regularities in the observed signals, which may be subtle and of high order, and use them to construct world models and guide behavior (7-10). However, even powerful statistical models have inherent difficulties with natural cognitive concepts, which depend not only on statistical regularities in the sensory input but also on their significance and meaning to the observer. For example, in learning to understand actions and goals, an important part is identifying the agents' hands, their configuration, and their interactions with objects (1-3). This is an example in which significant and meaningful features can be nonsalient and highly variable and therefore difficult to learn. Our testing shows that current computational methods for general object detection (11-13) applied to large training data do not result by themselves in automatically learning about hands. In contrast, detecting hands (14), paying attention to what they are doing (15, 16), and using them to make inferences and predictions (1-3, 17) are natural for humans and appear early in development. How is it possible for infants to acquire such concepts in early development?A large body of developmental studies has suggested that the human cognitive system is equipped through evolution with basic innate structures that facilitate the acquisition of meaningf...

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“…For example, Gallese et al (1996) reported that the firing of 38% of MNs depended on whether right-or left-hand actions were observed, while 64% were sensitive to the direction (i.e., right-to-left or left-toright) of the same reaching action. Similarly, MN firing typically depends on whether the observer monkey can reach the target object (53% of MNs; Caggiano et al, 2009) and the observer monkey's viewpoint (73% of MNs; Caggiano et al, 2011). If MNs encoded goals, whether goals are objects or intentions, their responses should be invariant to these features.…”

Section: Do Mirror Neurons Encode Goals?mentioning

confidence: 99%