Examining cross-modal fMRI adaptation for observed and executed actions in the monkey brain

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While mirror neurons have been found in several monkey brain regions, their existence in the human brain is still largely inferred from indirect non-invasive measurements like functional MRI. It has been proposed that, beyond showing overlapping brain responses during action observation and execution tasks, candidate mirror neuron regions should demonstrate cross-modal action specificity, in line with a defining physiological characteristic of these neurons in the monkey brain. Although cross-modal fMRI adaptation has been put forward as a suited method to test this key feature of cross-modal action specificity in the human brain, so far, the overall usefulness of this technique to demonstrate mirror neuron activity remains unclear. To date, it has never been tested to what extent monkey brain regions known to house mirror neurons, would yield uni- and/or cross-modal fMRI adaptation effects. We therefore performed an fMRI adaptation experiment while male rhesus macaques either performed or observed two different goal-directed hand actions. Executing grasp/lift or touch/press actions in the dark, as well as observing videos of these monkey hand actions, yielded robust responses throughout the brain, including overlapping fMRI responses in parietal and premotor mirror neuron regions. Uni-modal adaptation effects were mostly restricted to the visual modality and the early visual cortices. Both frequentist and Bayesian statistical analyses however suggested no evidence for cross-modal fMRI adaptation effects in monkey parietal and premotor mirror neuron regions. Overall, these findings suggest monkey mirror neuron activity does not readily translate into cross-modal repetition suppression effects that can be detected by fMRI.