That is because the software-based neural network created by the researchers appeared to closely mirror theories developed by biologists that suggest individual neurons are trained inside the brain to detect significant objects.
This work has since been cited by advocates of the mirror neuron theory of action understanding as support for their theory (e.g. Casile, Caggiano, & Ferrari, 2011), and has motivated numerous other infant studies aimed at confirming this hypothesis for the function of mirror neurons.
Thus, the primary aim of this paper is to critically examine the claim that infant data provide strong evidence for the mirror neuron theory of action understanding, and to situate infant data within an alternative theory of the function of the motor system during action observation.
But, even studies that have observed actual jealous behavior (such as a 2011 study by Barry X. Kuhle that involved coders analyzing episodes of the reality program Cheaters) have reported findings that mirror this theory.
However, difficulties of the mirror neuron theory itself [106]–[108] do not necessarily apply to motor-language interactions.
