Previous studies have reported that infants selectively reproduce observed actions and have argued that this selectivity reflects understanding of intentions and goals, or goal-directed imitation.
The new findings suggest that mirror activity not only reflects directly observed actions, but also extends to inherently more abstract verbal descriptions of actions, Aziz-Zadeh says.
In 1950, Henri Gastaut and his coworkers reported desynchronization of these waves not only during active movements of their subjects, but also while the subjects observed actions executed by someone else.
Automatic imitation is the tendency to reproduce observed actions involutarily.
Precisely, the human MNS responds to both executed and observed actions [37], and therefore might mediate the interference between executed and observed actions.
To account for lateralization effects [7], participants only observed actions performed by the hand contralateral to the stimulated hemisphere.
According to the goal-directed model observed actions are covertly simulated by a motor representation reflecting the most easy or available response allowing the same goal.
In this view, episodic information could be only partially integrated and, consequently, visual and semantic information might overwhelm sensorimotor signals, leading to a substantial similarity between enacted and observed actions.
Specialist or transformational theories suggest that the correspondence problem is solved by activating an innate, species-specific cognitive mechanism that represents observed actions in a special-purpose 'supramodal' or symbolic code [27].
The results of the current study suggest that infants might also emulate, rather than mirror, observed actions when the actions are relatively unfamiliar to them.
Practically, to be able to adjust AOT for individual patients, more research has to be done to reveal correlations between specific improvements achieved by patients as a result of AOT and observed actions.
