Monday, June 2, 2008
Mirror neuron survey
I posted a mirror neuron survey a couple of days ago, and we now have a small sample of responses. If this sample is representative, it seems there's a lot of divergent opinions and/or uncertainty about the role of mirror neurons in action understanding. I would LOVE to hear particularly from those of you who are voting either "yes" (mirror neurons ARE the basis for action understanding), or "not sure." Please let us know why you are voting the way you are. What evidence leads you to vote "yes"? Why are you unsure? This is a perfect opportunity to discuss these issues outside of the stiff, non-interactive journal format, and outside of the time-constrained, senior researcher-dominated conference format. You can even comment anonymously here. How easy is that?! So speak up! I promise to be nice. :-)
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5 comments:
The more I get into the field of cognitive neuroscience the more vague it appears to be. Whether it be theoretical constructs for human action understanding extracted from monkey neurons or brain imaging being held up as conclusive evidence of wh- movement. There are some gigantic leaps being made that require some serious re-examination. In short, I voted "not sure" as in seriously doubtful.
I agree with yisroel. What does 'understanding' mean, really. These are huge leaps we're making. I'm not sure we can make them.
i gotta go with my 'gut' in matters of science
The issue of what counts as "understanding" is extremely important, and not addressed well at all in the MN papers I've looked at. In world of MN-related speech studies, "action understanding" seems to be operationalized as the ability to discriminate between meaningless CV syllables. Odd to study action understanding with meaningless stimuli.
I think the biggest problem for this theory is the presence of broadly congruent mirror neurones. These cells broadly match executed actions to a range of similar observed actions. In fact from what we know about macaque mirror neurones (which is not a great deal considering how much we 'know' about human mirror neurones) broadly congruent cells out number strictly congruent cells.
Given this fact it is difficult to reconcile how the system subserve accurate recognition or understanding of executed actions.
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