Neural mirroring systems: exploring the EEG μ rhythm in human infancy

Abstract

How do human children come to understand the actions of other people? What neural systems are associated with the processing of others' actions and how do these systems develop, starting in infancy? These questions span cognitive psychology and developmental cognitive neuroscience, and addressing them has important implications for the study of social cognition. A large amount of research has used behavioral measures to investigate infants' imitation of the actions of other people; a related but smaller literature has begun to use neurobiological measures to study of infants' action representation. Here we focus on experiments employing electroencephalographic (EEG) techniques for assessing mu rhythm desynchronization in infancy, and analyze how this work illuminates the links between action perception and production prior to the onset of language.

Fig. 1

Photos demonstrating the execution (left) and observation (right) conditions in Marshall et al. (2010). EEG analyses were conducted on the epoch ranging from ±500 ms of the button push by the infant or adult. During observation infants did not have an object; they simply watched.