Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Hiroshi Ito
Summary: Individuals often imitate the postures or gestures of others in everyday life, known as automatic imitation, which plays an important role in social interactions. This study investigates if automatic imitation extends to complex sequential movements and finds that participants perform compatible actions faster than incompatible actions, indicating the presence of automatic imitation even in more complex movements.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Review
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Antonino Errante, Leonardo Fogassi
Summary: This review examines studies on the lateralization of cortical parietal and premotor areas in monkeys and humans, particularly focusing on the mirror neuron system (MNS) and its functional properties. The research indicates that action perception and execution may lead to unilateral or bilateral brain activation, with plastic changes in the MNS following specific brain damage.
Article
Neurosciences
Tahereh S. Zarghami, Peter Zeidman, Adeel Razi, Fariba Bahrami, Gholam-Ali Hossein-Zadeh
Summary: Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder characterized by dysconnection across the brain. This study investigated effective connectivity within large-scale networks in patients with schizophrenia, revealing dysconnection in several networks. The study also found significant correlations between specific effective connections and cognitive abilities of patients. Future research can explore the potential of whole-brain effective connectivity as a biomarker for diagnosis and cognitive assessment in brain disorders.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Qunjun Liang, Jinhui Li, Senning Zheng, Jiajun Liao, Ruiwang Huang
Summary: Hierarchical planning (HP) is a strategy that optimizes planning by storing lower-level steps as subgoals. Previous studies have identified the involvement of dmPFC, PMC, and SPL in the computation process of HP, but their interaction and contribution to HP computation remains unclear. Through an fMRI experiment, we confirmed the activity of dmPFC, PMC, and SPL, and used DCM and PEB models to quantify their connectivity and influence on response time.
Review
Behavioral Sciences
Lisie Valeria Paz, Thiago Wendt Viola, Bruna Bueno Milanesi, Juliana Henz Sulzbach, Regis Gemerasca Mestriner, Andrea Wieck, Leder Leal Xavier
Summary: Contagious depression theory suggests that depression can be induced or triggered by our social environment. This theory is based on the concept of emotional contagion, which states that affective states can be transferred during social interaction. This review summarizes two essential mechanisms of contagious depression - automatic mimicry and the mirror neuron system.
NEUROSCIENCE AND BIOBEHAVIORAL REVIEWS
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Bertrand Beffara, Fadila Hadj-Bouziane, Suliann Ben Hamed, C. Nico Boehler, Leonardo Chelazzi, Elisa Santandrea, Emiliano Macaluso
Summary: This study measured occipital activity in different spatial regions during the processing of visual displays and found that goal-directed attention and salience jointly modulate activity distribution in the occipital cortex, with involvement of multiple functional paths and interactions.
Article
Neurosciences
Weihua Zhao, Qi Liu, Xiaolu Zhang, Xinwei Song, Zhao Zhang, Peng Qing, Xiaolong Liu, Siyu Zhu, Wenxu Yang, Keith M. Kendrick
Summary: The mirror neuron system (MNS), which includes the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and superior temporal sulcus (STS), is important for action representation and imitation, but may be dys-functional in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this study, the researchers conducted a facial expression imitation task with healthy male subjects and measured the expression intensity using facial emotion recognition software (FaceReader) and MNS responses using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The results showed distinct patterns of MNS responses during imitation of different facial expressions, which were also associated with autistic traits.
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Kristina Czekoova, Daniel Joel Shaw, Martin Lamos, Beata Spilakova, Miguel Salazar, Milan Brazdil
Summary: Research suggests that in the process of automatic imitation, rotated hand-action stimuli play an important role in neurocognitive mechanisms, which may also be influenced by orthogonal spatial effects.
COGNITIVE AFFECTIVE & BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Jiali Huang, Jae-Yoon Jung, Chang S. Nam
Summary: This study used Dynamic Causal Modeling to investigate the causal relationship among brain regions in different stages of AD. The results showed reduced connectivity and weaker connection strengths in AD patients, which were partially predictive of cognitive scores.
FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Weidong Cai, Srikanth Ryali, Ramkrishna Pasumarthy, Viswanath Talasila, Vinod Menon
Summary: Working memory is a crucial component of cognition, but its mechanisms are not well understood. The study reveals distinct roles of the SN and FPN in systems control, and shows that network controllability decreases with an increase in working memory load.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Elizabeth Renner, Yishan Xie, Francys Subiaul, Antonia F. de C. Hamilton
Summary: This study compared two hypotheses about imitative actions and found evidence both supporting and contradicting these hypotheses using fMRI experiments. The results showed that imitation-specific responses do not occur in typical mirror regions but rather in the occipital cortex. While there were activation differences in action execution outside of MNS regions, they did not align with the Grist-Mills hypothesis.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Eitan Hemed, Ilya Mark-Tavger, Uri Hertz, Shirel Bakbani-Elkayam, Baruch Eitam
Summary: The study found that the effects of automatic imitation only occur for task-relevant responses, with participants generally not imitating movements that are not part of the task set. Task relevance was shown to modulate the mental activation of information.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-GENERAL
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Sadjad Sadeghi, Stephanie N. L. Schmidt, Daniela Mier, Joachim Hass
Summary: This study used dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to determine the effective connectivity of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) during different social cognition tasks. The results showed that there were effective connections from the superior temporal sulcus (STS) to the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) and Brodmann area 44 (BA44) in all social cognition processes. Additional mutual connections were found in the imitation task.
SOCIAL COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Mathematical
Hannah Wilt, Yuchunzi Wu, Bronwen G. Evans, Patti Adank
Summary: Simulation accounts propose that speech perception involves covert imitation to support perception in a top-down manner. We conducted three experiments to test this model. The results showed that covert imitation effects were stronger when perceiving non-native speech sounds, and producing non-native speech actions also enhanced automatic imitation effects.
PSYCHONOMIC BULLETIN & REVIEW
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Yuhai Xie, Puming Zhang, Jun Zhao
Summary: SS-DCM is a method for studying effective connectivity in neural populations using rs-fMRI. It improves estimation accuracy by constructing a Bayesian model in the spectral domain and sampling parameters using a random walked Markov Chain Monte Carlo scheme. Comparative evaluations using synthetic and empirical data showed that SS-DCM provided the most accurate estimations and higher classification accuracy.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Jose Sanchez-Bornot, Roberto C. Sotero, J. A. Scott Kelso, Ozguer Simsek, Damien Coyle
Summary: This study proposes a multi-penalized state-space model for analyzing unobserved dynamics, using a data-driven regularization method. Novel algorithms are developed to solve the model, and a cross-validation method is introduced to evaluate regularization parameters. The effectiveness of this method is validated through simulations and real data analysis, enabling a more accurate exploration of cognitive brain functions.