Neural Substrates For Human Imitation With Evaluation:an FMRI Study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been developed since1990, which is a technique to investigate brain function. fMRI is harmless, and can do detection repeatedly with high resolution. It has been widely used in brain research, such as cognitive neuroscience research, and diseases research. Imitation is a basic cognitive ability, which is an important research topic in cognitive neuroscience. Imitation is the process that an individual repeat the behavior of others consciously or unconsciously and it is the foundation of learning. Human imitation help individual adapt to society and promote the formation of groups, which is also crucial to human’s study and social communication.Over the last few decades, many neuroimaging studies have found that neural circuits of imitation could changed by different imitation types, and affected by the social environments. Generally speaking, the evaluation from others often help us understand of ourselves better and induce positive adjustment of our behavior in daily life. This article reviewed previous researches of imitation, and investigated another interference factor of imitation—evaluation from others.We used fMRI to study the neural mechanisms underlying the effect of evaluation from others when imitation occurs. Sixteen pictures of different finger gestures without any specific social meaning were chosen to be the experimental stimuli. The experimental tasks were divided into three kinds of blocks:observation blocks, imitation blocks and evaluation blocks, and the evaluation blocks included four subtypes:poor, not bad, ok, and perfect. The imaging data were analyzed using SPM and DPARSF. Our results showed that the activation areas during the imitation in this study were consistent to previous researches. We found that the activation of mirror neurons were enhanced by evaluation from others, and the over activation brain areas were involved in action controlling. Furthermore, the extreme negative evaluation caused greater brain activation than the positive evaluation. Our study suggested that other people’s evaluation has a significant impact on neural circuits of imitation.