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Related Experiment Videos

Lesion evidence for a human mirror neuron system.

Ellen Binder1, Anna Dovern1, Maike D Hesse1

  • 1Department of Neurology, University Hospital Cologne, Cologne, Germany; Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-3), Research Centre Juelich, Juelich, Germany.

Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior
|April 10, 2017
PubMed
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Patients with left hemisphere stroke and apraxia showed significant deficits in imitating, recognizing, and comprehending actions, supporting the role of the mirror neuron system (MNS) in these functions.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Science
  • Neurology

Background:

  • The mirror neuron system (MNS) in primates comprises neurons firing both during action execution and observation.
  • A human MNS homolog, a fronto-parietal network, is hypothesized but its functional necessity for action processing remains debated.
  • Understanding the MNS's role in action imitation and comprehension is crucial for neurological research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the functional role of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) in action imitation, recognition, and comprehension.
  • To determine if lesions in key MNS regions in left hemisphere (LH) stroke patients cause similar deficits across these three motor cognitive tasks.
  • To examine the relationship between lesion location within the MNS and specific deficits in action processing.

Main Methods:

Keywords:
Action understandingApraxiaImitationStrokeVoxel-based lesion-symptom mapping

Related Experiment Videos

  • Examined imitation, recognition, and comprehension of intransitive meaningful limb actions in patients with LH stroke.
  • Compared performance of apraxic patients (n=18) with non-apraxic patients (n=26) and healthy controls (n=19).
  • Utilized voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) to correlate lesion location with behavioral deficits.

Main Results:

  • Apraxic patients performed significantly worse than non-apraxic patients and controls on all three motor cognitive tasks.
  • Lesions in apraxic patients more frequently affected key MNS regions: left inferior frontal, superior temporal, supramarginal gyri, and inferior parietal lobe.
  • VLSM indicated anterior MNS lesions primarily impacted gesture comprehension, while posterior lesions primarily caused imitation deficits.

Conclusions:

  • Clinical data support the hypothesis that LH lesions to core MNS regions impair action imitation, recognition, and comprehension to a similar extent.
  • The findings underscore the critical role of the putative human MNS in processing meaningful actions.
  • Evidence suggests a partially differentiated functional organization within the human MNS for action imitation versus comprehension.