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Updated: Jul 8, 2026

Motor Imagery Performance Through Embodied Digital Twins in a Virtual Reality-Enabled Brain-Computer Interface Environment
Published on: May 10, 2024
Mirror neurons and motor intentionality
Giacomo Rizzolatti1, Corrado Sinigaglia
1Department of Neurosciences, Section of Physiology, University of Parma, Italy. giacomo.rizzolatti@unipr.it
Abstract:
Our social life rests to a large extent on our ability to understand the intentions of others. What are the bases of this ability? A very influential view is that we understand the intentions of others because we are able to represent them as having mental states. Without this meta-representational (mind-reading) ability their behavior would be meaningless to us. Over the past few years this view has been challenged by neurophysiological findings and, in particular, by the discovery of mirror neurons. The functional properties of these neurons indicate that intentional understanding is based primarily on a mechanism that directly matches the sensory representation of the observed actions with one's own motor representation of those same actions. These findings reveal how deeply motor and intentional components of action are intertwined, suggesting that both can be fully comprehended only starting from a motor approach to intentionality.
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