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The discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys (Di Pellegrino et al., 1992; Gallese et al., 1996; Rizzolatti et al., 1996) has generally been greeted as support for the idea that motor areas play an essential role in understanding observed actions and the inference of the pursued goals of these actions, as these neurons fire upon both observing and executing actions, leading to the idea that the observer simulates the observed action (Gallese & Goldman, 1998). This suggestion was further backed up by the finding that the human motor system becomes activated during action observation (Buccino, Binkofski, & Riggio, 2 () 04a; Buccino et al., 2001; Fadiga et al., 2005; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). Due to the supposedly direct and noninferential character of this process, this phenomenon is often referred to as" motor resonance".

Ever since the discovery of mirror neurons many fascinating findings have been reported. However, the explanatory power of mirror neurons regarding action understanding has fallen out of step with the continuous stream of experiments and accompanying findings. Theories on the mirror neuron system (MNS) and motor resonance have recently received criticism (Dinstein et al., 2008; Hickok, 2009; Jacob &Jeannerod, 2005). The general purport of this criticism is that mirror neurons cannot account for certain experimental findings (Hickok, 2009; Saxe, 2005a; 2009), or that the generalization from monkey data to the human mirror neuron system is not warranted (Dinstein et al., 2008; Lingnau et al., 2009). Also, theoretical concerns about the limitation of action understanding by means of directmatching have been …