Search results for "Mirror neuron"
showing 10 items of 32 documents
The effect of neurodegenerative lesions on the mechanism of motor resonance induced by action observation
2018
The concept of “embodied cognition” considers that the classical Perception-Cognition-Action architecture proposing a sequential flow of processing with clean cuts between all modules is not appropriate to understand the behavioral effect of neurodegenerative disorders and to find innovative therapeutic solutions. In the last decades, the discovery of the mirror neurons (MN) has given a biological substrate to this theoretical perspective: the MN are now thought linking together knowledge about actions and perceptions not only to integrate perception in action planning and execution but also as a neural mechanism supporting a wide range of cognitive functions, e.g. empathy and language. At …
Recognizing actions with the associative self-organizing map
2013
When artificial agents interact and cooperate with other agents, either human or artificial, they need to recognize others’ actions and infer their hidden intentions from the sole observation of their surface level movements. Indeed, action and intention understanding in humans is believed to facilitate a number of social interactions and is supported by a complex neural substrate (i.e. the mirror neuron system). Implementation of such mechanisms in artificial agents would pave the route to the development of a vast range of advanced cognitive abilities, such as social interaction, adaptation, and learning by imitation, just to name a few. We present a first step towards a fully-fledged int…
Motor simulation via coupled internal models using sequential Monte Carlo
2011
We describe a generative Bayesian model for action understanding in which inverse-forward internal model pairs are considered 'hypotheses' of plausible action goals that are explored in parallel via an approximate inference mechanism based on sequential Monte Carlo methods. The reenactment of internal model pairs can be considered a form of motor simulation, which supports both perceptual prediction and action understanding at the goal level. However, this procedure is generally considered to be computationally inefficient. We present a model that dynamically reallocates computational resources to more accurate internal models depending on both the available prior information and the predic…
The role of synergies within generative models of action execution and recognition: A computational perspective. Comment on "Grasping synergies: A mo…
2015
Controlling the body – given its huge number of degrees of freedom – poses severe computational challenges. Mounting evidence suggests that the brain alleviates this problem by exploiting “synergies”, or patterns of muscle activities (and/or movement dynamics and kinematics) that can be combined to control action, rather than controlling individual muscles of joints [1–10]. D’Ausilio et al. [11] explain how this view of motor organization based on synergies can profoundly change the way we interpret studies of action recognition in humans and monkeys, and in particular the controversy on the “granularity” of the mirror neuron system (MNs): whether it encodes either (lower) kinematic aspects…
Modulation of cortical motor outputs by the symbolic meaning of visual stimuli
2010
The observation of an action modulates motor cortical outputs in specific ways, in part through mediation of the mirror neuron system. Sometimes we infer a meaning to an observed action based on integration of the actual percept with memories. Here, we conducted a series of experiments in healthy adults to investigate whether such inferred meanings can also modulate motor cortical outputs in specific ways. We show that brief observation of a neutral stimulus mimicking a hand does not significantly modulate motor cortical excitability (Study 1) although, after prolonged exposure, it can lead to a relatively nonspecific modulation (Study 2). However, when such a neutral stimulus is preceded b…
L'iconicité phonologique dans les neurosciences cognitives et dans la tradition linguistique française
2014
A significant part of the recent research in language neuropsychology and neurophysiology seems to revive the long-standing hypothesis of an originally motivated relations hip between phonetics and semantics. Even if phonological iconicity is a long neglected subject in linguistics, particularly in French linguistics of the second half of the XXth century, a long tradition of researches does exist. It can be traced back to Plato in the old age and to Leibniz in modern age, and it has important manifestations in France too. This article aims to illustrate critically the theories of phonological iconicity developed by Charles de Brosses at the age of Enlightenment (1765), by Maurice Grammont …
Disabilità visiva e neuroni specchio
2009
Il seguente lavoro ha come obiettivo quello indagare, il possibile coinvolgimento del sistema dei neuroni specchio nella disabilità visiva, cercando di analizzare, in particolare, come il soggetto non vedente possa comprendere e conoscere l’azione degli altri privato dal corpus di informazioni provenienti dal canale visivo. L’ipotesi da verificare è se nei soggetti con disabilità visiva e nei soggetti con sviluppo tipico venga messo in gioco e con quale modalità, lo stesso sistema di neuroni specchio unitario (visivo-uditivo) per il riconoscimento dell’azione. Inoltre, lo studio dovrebbe consentire di verificare se la disabilità visiva ad esordio precoce (congenita) è in grado di aumentare …
Action simulation in the human brain: Twelve questions
2013
Although the idea of action simulation is nowadays popular in cognitive science, neuroscience and robotics, many aspects of the simulative processes remain unclear from empirical, computational, and neural perspectives. In the first part of the article, we provide a critical review and assessment of action simulation theories advanced so far in the wider literature of embodied and motor cognition. We focus our analysis on twelve key questions, and discuss them in the context of human and (occasionally) primate studies. In the second part of the article, we describe an integrative neuro-computational account of action simulation, which links the neural substrate (as revealed in neuroimaging …
La ricerca sul campo come extraordinary experience. Una proposta di ricerca multidisciplinare
2010
Reflexive criticism focused its attention on writing texts, neglecting the experience of observation, on which the practice of field research is built, and it rarely paid attention to the experience of researchers. The triple relationship established between the anthropologist, the world and the “other” reveals the deep interrelation between the three levels of this “complex isotopy”. This essay addresses the problem of how a person can interact with another within the ethnographic practice. Ethnographic research doesn’t consist only in dialogues but also in bodily experiences that have a key role in the production of ethnographic representations. Experiential anthropologists believe that w…
Two traditions of cognitive sociology : an analysis and assessment of their cognitive and methodological assumptions
2022
Cognitive sociology has been split into cultural and interdisciplinary traditions that position themselves differently in relation to the cognitive sciences and make incompatible assumptions about cognition. This article provides an analysis and assessment of the cognitive and methodological assumptions of these two traditions from the perspective of the mechanistic theory of explanation. We argue that while the cultural tradition of cognitive sociology has provided important descriptions about how human cognition varies across cultural groups and historical periods, it has not opened up the black box of cognitive mechanisms that produce and sustain this variation. This means that its expla…