Exploring yawning with neuroimaging

The neural mechanisms responsible for spontaneous yawning as well as contagious yawning are not well characterized. Neuroimaging is an essential tool for helping to identify the seminal neural structures and their inter-related functions to carry out this complex stereotyped motor program. Studies to date have explored the structural neural correlates of yawning through a series of lesion-based case reports and identified participatory structures at various levels of the central nervous system. Functional neuroimaging methods like fMRI have also shed led on the genesis of contagious yawning, though cohesive models explaining the neural mechanisms of contagious motor programs such as yawning remain limited.