Friday, October 16, 2009

Still in Chicago ... the Fadiga-Hickok mirror extravaganza

We're sitting in the Marriott. Luciano and Greg are beginning their debate. The debate-whisperers on my left and right: Al Braun from the NIH, Karthik Durvasula from Delaware, Bill Idsardi from Maryland.
Strong rhetorical point 1: Fadiga and his buddies used to eat lunch and smoke in the lab -- sounds fun. Fadiga is a funny speaker, and a charming participant. But 5 mins in, still no argument... Nice deployment of humor, though.
LF is showing TMS data, fMRI data, and intracranial stim data to marshal arguments for the existence of mirror neurons in humans. He is, I think rightly, focusing on the motor activation during speech perception and production. But, not surprises there.

3 comments:

Bill Idsardi said...

Large audio/video/multimedia advantage to LF.

Tony Barnhart said...

Fadiga glossed right over the fact that the MEG recordings for tongue activity during processing of CVCCV words containing /rr/ was reduced for similar nonwords. Doesn't that suggest that a substantial portion of the activation is due to top-down activity? Sound like a priming effect to me, and not so supportive of mirror neuron theory.

Bill Idsardi said...

Greg: SDT FTW!