The Automatical Coding Mechanism Of Mirror Neurons During Action Imitation

Mirror neurons are considered to be the key findings which had been changing cognitive neuroscience, they transform researchers'attention from the exploration of the aspects of perception-behavior to look for the human mirror neuron activity cross-disciplinarily. The impact accompanied is revolutionary in nature. Especially, they have intrigued substantial interesting researches for their important role in social cognitive functions, such as imitation, empathy, language, action understanding, et al.The main purpose of this study is to explore the course of action imitation of mirror neurons coding mechanism of the observed action. The experiment 1 researches on theμrhythm distribution and activation in the cerebral cortex during imitation by quantified EEG methods, and makes theμrhythm oscillation as an indicator to indirectly reflect the activation of mirror neurons in the course of action imitation. Concurrently, we require the subjects to judge the shape of fingernail enamel at the end of each trial in order to verify that the action is also coded by the feature based bottom-up processing mechanism. Whether the direct matching mechanism executed by the mirror neurons between the representation of the observed action and the action presentation in the motor repertoire is automatically can't reach agreement currently. The experiment 2 is ingeniously combined with the Stroop paradigm to take the advantage of the P300 latency which is thought to reflect the processing course of stimulus evaluation of the subjects, as well as analyze the response time data. The combination of reaction time data and the ERPs data can also further explore the time course of the activation of mirror neurons during imitation.The results show that, there do exist the disassociation of higher frequency(10.5～13HZ) and lower frequency(8～10.5HZ) in theμrhythm(8～13HZ), action imitation does have mirror neurons involved, the mirror neurons code the observed action engaging the feature based bottom-up processing mechanism, and the direct matching performed by mirror neurons is fully automatically.