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Visual observation of human actions provokes more motor activation than observation of robotic actions. We investigated the extent to which this visuomotor priming effect is mediated by bottom‐up or top‐down processing. The bottom‐up hypothesis suggests that robotic movements are less effective in activating the ‘mirror system’ via pathways from visual areas via the superior temporal sulcus to parietal and premotor cortices. The top‐down hypothesis postulates that beliefs about the animacy of a movement stimulus modulate mirror system activity via descending pathways from areas such as the temporal pole and prefrontal cortex. In an automatic imitation task, subjects performed a prespecified movement (e.g. hand opening) on presentation of a human or robotic hand making a compatible (opening) or incompatible (closing) movement. The speed of responding on compatible trials, compared with incompatible …