sensorimotor experience and language

[Lynn Eubank]

> Elizabeth Bates wrote:
> >....
> >For example, Italian neurophysiologist Rizzolatti has studied
> > neurons in premotor cortex that fire preferentially when the monkey is
> > planning an arm movement in one particular direction (a kind of covert
> > motor analogue to the line-orientation preference cells in visual cortex).
> > The most interesting finding here for our purposes is that these cells
> > also fire when the monkey observes someone else making an analogous
> > arm movement!

It is, of course, hard to sort through all of this. How did Rizzolatti
know, for example, that their monkey was "planning" an arm movement?
Actually, I suppose that Rizzolatti did have an experimental paradigm
that isolates planning activity (though it'd still be interesting to
know how it was done). But then comes the next question: When the monkey
observes an analogous movement, is this a movement that the monkey is in
some sense already familiar with? In other words, with monkey-see/
monkey-do, are we talking about a see-do pairing that the monkey would
have to -learn- to do? The question becomes relevant, I think, for
concerns one might have about -acquisition- in humans.

later,
Lynn Eubank
eubank at unt.edu