Dance and the Mirror Neuron System
Emily S. Cross, Dartmouth College
 

The ability to understand other people’s actions and to learn new actions through observation is a ubiquitous feature of human behavior.  Prior research on action observation has identified brain areas that are similarly active when individuals perform actions or watch others perform the same actions.  While some features of this action resonance or ‘mirror neuron’ system have been investigated, many more remain to be explored.  I will discuss studies of dancers learning new movement sequences, which tests the sensitivity of this network to several different types of experience.  In the first study, expert dancers were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) across 6 weeks while they learned a series of complex new movement sequences.  With this longitudinal study, we were able to investigate how newly acquired motor expertise is manifest within the mirror neuron system.  The second study addressed questions about observational learning and how the mirror neuron system differentiates between biological and symbolic action cues.   Pre-training and post-training fMRI scans were collected on a group of non-dancers who learned to perform movement sequences to music with a Dance Dance Revolution-type game.  Data from this study indicate that individual components of the mirror neuron system show differential responses based on training experience and cue type.  Implications of this work will be discussed in terms of pedagogy and rehabilitation.