Does apraxia support spatial and kinematic or mirror neuron approaches to social interaction? A commentary on Binder et al. (2017)

Abstract

First paragraph: In a recent article in Cortex Binder et al. (2017) present data from 44 left-hemisphere stroke patients with (n = 18) and without (n = 26) apraxia. They tested these patients, alongside healthy controls (n = 19), on three experimental tasks (meaningful gesture recognition, comprehension, and imitation), and two control tasks (control recognition, control comprehension). They also performed a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) in order to associate lesion locations with experimental task performance in patients. They were specifically interested in examining whether regions associated with the putative human mirror neuron system (MNS) are involved critically, and to a similar degree, in recognising, understanding, and imitating actions.