X-Message-Number: 11385 Date: Sun, 07 Mar 1999 19:57:42 -0500 From: Jan Coetzee <> Subject: "Mind reading"?? I don't know the source. J.C. ================ A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkey's premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental evidence suggests that a similar matching system also exists in humans. What might be the functional role of this matching system? One possible function is to enable an organism to detect certain mental states of observed conspecifics. This function might be part of, or a precursor to, a more general mind-reading ability. Two different accounts of mind-reading have been suggested. According to `theory theory', mental states are represented as inferred posits of a naive theory. According to `simulation theory', other people's mental states are represented by adopting their perspective: by tracking or matching their states with resonant states of one's own. The activity of mirror neurons, and the fact that observers undergo motor facilitation in the same muscular groups as those utilized by target agents, are findings that accord well with simulation theory but would not be predicted by theory theory. How do we understand other people's behavior? How can we assign goals, intentions, or beliefs to the inhabitants of our social world? A possible way to answer these challenging questions is to adopt an evolutionary frame of reference, both in phylogenetical and ontogenetical terms, envisaging these `mind-reading' capacities as rooted in antecedent, more `ancient' and simple mechanisms. This approach can capitalize on the results of different fields of investigation: neurophysiology can investigate the neural correlates of precursors of these mechanisms in lower species of social primates such as macaque monkeys. Developmental psychology can study how the capacity to attribute propositional attitudes to others develops. In the present article we will propose that humans' mind-reading abilities rely on the capacity to adopt a simulation routine. This capacity might have evolved from an action execution/observation matching system whose neural correlate is represented by a class of neurons recently discovered in the macaque monkey premotor cortex: mirror neurons (MNs). _______________________________________________________________ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11385