ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2016
Mu desynchronization during observation and execution of facial expressions in 30-month-old children.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Experience with pointing gestures facilitates infant vocabulary growth through enhancement of sensorimotor brain activity.Developmental psychology · 2023Trial
- Facial palsy reveals the sensorimotor contribution to facial-emotion recognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Decoding motor imagery related to major mimetic muscles from electroencephalography.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2026Article
- Effects of tRNS on perception of static and dynamic displays of social-emotional communication.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Recognition of facial expressions from minimal five-point-light displays.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Infants' neural processing of emotional faces after ostracism.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neural responses to emotional displays by politicians: differential mu and alpha suppression patterns in response to in-party and out-party leaders.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Differences in Mu rhythm when seeing grasping/motor actions in a real context versus on screens.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Similarities and differences in the functional architecture of mother- infant communication in rhesus macaque and British mother-infant dyads.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Differential beta desynchronisation responses to dynamic emotional facial expressions are attenuated in higher trait anxiety and autism.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Mu rhythm suppression over sensorimotor regions is associated with greater empathic accuracy.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Facial Expression Time Processing in Typical Development and in Patients with Congenital Facial Palsy.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Altering Facial Movements Abolishes Neural Mirroring of Facial Expressions.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Sensorimotor Activity and Network Connectivity to Dynamic and Static Emotional Faces in 7-Month-Old Infants.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- The Effect of Baseline on Toddler Event-Related Mu-Rhythm Modulation.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Oxytocin promotes prosocial behavior and related neural responses in infant macaques at-risk for compromised social development.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2021Article
- The Effect of Media Professionalization on Cognitive Neurodynamics During Audiovisual Cuts.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Article
- Building blocks of joint attention: Early sensitivity to having one's own gaze followed.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2019Article
- Mental Simulation of Facial Expressions: Mu Suppression to the Viewing of Dynamic Neutral Face Videos.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2019Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Simulation theories propose that observing another's facial expression activates sensorimotor representations involved in the execution of that expression, facilitating recognition processes. The mirror neuron system (MNS) is a potential mechanism underlying simulation of facial expressions, with like neural processes activated both during observation and performance. Research with monkeys and adult humans supports this proposal, but so far there have been no investigations of facial MNS activity early in human development. The current study used electroencephalography (EEG) to explore mu rhythm desynchronization, an index of MNS activity, in 30-month-old children as they observed videos of dynamic emotional and non-emotional facial expressions, as well as scrambled versions of the same videos. We found significant mu desynchronization in central regions during observation and execution of both emotional and non-emotional facial expressions, which was right-lateralized for emotional and bilateral for non-emotional expressions during observation. These findings support previous research suggesting movement simulation during observation of facial expressions, and are the first to provide evidence for sensorimotor activation during observation of facial expressions, consistent with a functioning facial MNS at an early stage of human development.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.