When one person views a situation with two or more people showing a range of emotions and/or actions, what does the viewer mirror? For example, if person A sees B hurting C, will they necessarily mirror the victim, C, - or both somehow, or will that depend on the internal biases of the viewer (which is what I suspect)? Does anyone know of any studies looking at these kinds of situations? I have only come across studies where one viewer mirrors one other.
Many thanks for any help.
All Answers (17)
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I dont know sure, but maybe attention and neurons mirror pattern activation are linked. If you find one article oh this topic, please attached in this post. Thx. -
I guess any relevant studies in humans would be using brain imaging rather than measuring actual neurons - but maybe there are some animal studies? It probably is more of a question about attention - it's the attention that is biased and that then will bias the mirror-response.
But not everyone feels distressed at another's distress - some people might find it enjoyable or exciting. Wonder what's going on there wrt mirroring <<speculating wildly>>. -
The result is entirely dependent upon vision and not 'perception' per se. The process is governed by visual and auditory input - but please remember that our primary visual input is coming in through the fovea and not the entire retina - so, where you put your attention (aim your fovea) is what the mirror neurons will respond to (or what you attend to with your hearing) ... as regulated by emotion and available to top-down processing. Now, if one were to imagine a heated debate between two people at sufficient distance that both actors were entirely contained within the foveal field, then it truly becomes attentional (as with hearing), and though one would be aware of the other's intentions through the MNS, in each case the signal strength would be greatly diminished as the visual data is reduced (fine motoric responses of the actors are imperceptible, are are small body/posture changes, facial affect, etc.).
I can't recall the exact article, but Iacoboni did a great paper with a neurosurgeon where they had the opportunity to directly explore aspects of the MNS in the human brain with probes ... I'll see if I can find it in my piles.... -
So in a real situation there would be no competition because your attention could only really be focussed on one stimuli of sufficient strength to stimulate mirror neurons. That's very interesting, thanks.
There was a recent Neuroscience paper with Iacoboni (by Hogeveen) suggesting that stimulating the mirror network increased subsequent sensitivity to social stimuli. Then again, I also - I recently read a paper showing that medical drs have a reduced pain-related ERP (so increased stimulation lead to less sensitivity). I guess this implies that more pleasurable feedback has a positive feedback loop and vice versa implying that mirror neurons are highly and rapidly adaptive.
I'm just trying to figure the mirror model out and how it accommodates people not having the same reactions to others' emotions. -
I think that it is more that what is mirrored is the actions, and what determines their impact is the evaluation of the effects of those actions. -
The impression I have from the monkey literature and the human brain imaging, is that the evaluation is part and parcel with the motor response. But I'm by no means clear about that.
I'm interested in the emotional mirroring of e.g. distress. When a monkey is distressed at another monkey's pain - does that arise directly from the mirror neuron response or is that a further (but also involuntary) evaluation of that motor response?
I can see how that could work - our own motor responses would be cataloged against our own emotional library for automatic linking. This would be a very good way of accounting for much of the variation in response.
However, (I need to reread about this) I thought some of the more recent work on mirror neurons was suggesting they could be found in non-motor areas, i.e. areas implicated directly in emotion. -
If mirror neurons serve an evolutionary survival function, which seems likely, they may (at some point) mirror that activity which is interpreted as the most likely to ensure survival. I have no research or data to back this up - it just seems consistent with what I have learned so far. Somewhere, many years ago, I did hear a proposal that suggested young children model the behavior of the parent who appears to be the "winner" in any interaction. -
That's interesting and makes sense. However, I've also read that a great many of the interactions between infant and parent are actually elicited from the parent by the infant. Wouldn't it be great if we could all remember exactly where we read and heard things....
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This discussion is a bit confused, because the "MNS" is badly defined. Mirror neurons are originally the ones found in monkey premotor cortex, supplemented with the mirror neurons in the sensory parietal cortex (Fogassi et al). It is generally agreed that such neurons also exist in humans. However, the "MNS" tends to spread out (in various publications) to almost the entire cortex. If we take the wide definition, there is quite a lot of literature to visual mechanisms of biological motion processing: there are search tasks (eg Cavanagh 2001), saccade tasks with multiple targets (Verfaillie), composed biological motion (Wittinghofer), position-independent aftereffects (Theusner), etc. It seems to be possible to perceive several actions simultaneously, but this is not really clear.
Attention is important, but attention is not necessarily aligned with the fovea. For the neurons in monkey STS it is known that they are highly position invariant, so the stimulus may be located almost anywhere on the retina.
To stay a bit closer to "mirror neurons", you might want to look into the Joint Action literature: there are a few studies against two companion actors. -
That's great thanks. I see that MN have spread out. I've just been looking at the first paper showing single neuron responses in humans (Mukamel, 2010) and they were all over the place. I have another interest in attention, apart from MNS stuff - so the literature recommendations are very welcome.
My current reading is at the point of thinking - yes there seem to be MN in humans (if you take the wide view) - but what are they really doing, i.e. what responses arise directly from MN and which are more usefully or appropriately described via other processes? Some people ascribe a great deal, e.g. the entire foundation of empathy, to MN in humans but some studies support a very limited role for MN in the more advanced social responses of humans vs non-human primates. -
http://www.ildiogene.it/EncyPages/Ency=neuronispecchio.html is interesting article on mirror neuron -
Thank you for that article. I am enjoying the comments that relate to speculations based on the latest science. I have collected a number of articles on neuroscience and find it validating of my observations, but am not a neuroscientist.
I am interested in how babies and young children learn everything, from the concrete aspects of the real world to the concepts, but most importantly I focus on what they learn about who they are, what they can and can't do, how they copy parents in the early years and resist them in the later years, why they love learning and don't love school, and what parents can provide that will make parenting an adventurous challenge rather than a power struggle that typically doesn't end until children leave home. In my 30+ years with children in open learning environments, I have concluded that two basic human drives cause a learning and relational dilemma for young children, and why our disciplinary strategies end up causing later unworkable behaviors. This project is going well, including a solution that is working in the workshops I lead, and any research that anyone has to contribute would be welcome. -
I agree with Marc de Lussanet and am beginning to suspect what has been labeled as the MNS may in fact simply be the broader VEN network, however there is very good human data that Iacoboni obtained through the assistance of a neurosugeon ... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2904852/pdf/nihms-188032.pdf
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Dear all of you: i heard some researchers here in Argentina, sayng that mirror neurons are an discarded and obsolete concept. They say that it doesnt exist some "area" of mirror n., and that all the empathy, connection among brians, etc, belongs to the whole cortex activity, as a functional area, nor anatomically defined.Any opinon?, i haven't. -
Research of functional role of mirror neurons, though is recent but now it has prompted many scientists including me to think application of mirror neuron in social, cognitive neuroscience and in the neurobiology of disease. Since 2006, I have been coming across number of research reports on potential role of mirror neuron based on fMRI or PET techniques. I think it is the time when we must initiate collaborations between computational neurosciences and systems neuroscientists for further insight.
Dr RC Sharma, AIMST Malaysia -
This is a very interesting exchange! I have the impression that we all get onto to one system like that of the mirror neurons without recalling that multiple other brain systems inform processing by that original system in what becomes a rather complex and daunting design (i.e. not unlike being thrilled to discover gene-environment interactions and then being floored by gene-gene-environment-environment interactions). So the systems that affect salience, attention, motivation-- often guided by emotion and arousal in the context of attachment relationships would seem to me to be interacting with the mirror neurons to determine whether in a situation of, for example, exposure to violence, one more likely mirrors the victim and/or the perpetrator-- this latter question is at the heart of our research (see Schechter et al., 2007 Attach & Hum Dev; Schechter et al.,. 2011 J Interpersonal Violence and SCAN). In terms of the mirror system, a paper by Pineda and Oberman (2006) relating to motivation to smoke and mirror neurons is a nice place to start and to consider some of this complexity. -
I am not sure these contributions exactly address the initial question, even though I admit it is always nice to digress around ;-)).
My personal opinion on that is that like for the visual system, in which you can identify at the same time different objects and people, you can mirror at the same time different aspects of what you observe. So if you are able to identify two people B and C, there is no reason to think that you would not be able to ascribe them distinct personal features taken from your mirror (empathy) system, just the same way you were able to distinguish their clothes, faces, etc... There is no reason to think that the mirror system would do much worse than any other cognitive system for which you would find it obvious to be able to perform several things or ascribe distinct attributes to distinct objects or people at the same time...
Having said that, whether mirror neurons actually represent the physiological basis of empathy is a problem that will certainly take decades to be solved (ie proven or dismissed)!
Popular Answers
Attention is important, but attention is not necessarily aligned with the fovea. For the neurons in monkey STS it is known that they are highly position invariant, so the stimulus may be located almost anywhere on the retina.
To stay a bit closer to "mirror neurons", you might want to look into the Joint Action literature: there are a few studies against two companion actors.