Monday, March 31, 2008

Mirror Neuron Graduate Course Starts Today

TB graduate course #2 starts today.  Topic: Mirror Neurons.  The goal is to survey what we know about MNs in the monkey and presumed correlates in humans, and to consider what kind of theoretical conclusions the data allow.  We will cover a range of empirical and theoretical topics related to MNs, but all with an eye toward the implications of this work on understanding the functional anatomy of speech/language.

As with our course on semantics and brain, this is a live course that I am teaching at TB West (UC Irvine), Mondays 1-4.  I will post our readings, as well as summaries of our in-class discussion.  Please feel free to jump in with your own comments or suggestions.

Today's meeting will review evidence on task effects in mapping neural systems involved in speech perception, as this point is critical in evaluating the role of frontal cortex in speech tasks.  The main points have already been summarized on this blog in a thread on "Meta-linguistic tasks."

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