The DOI matches its Crossref record; 134 of the 134 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Mirror neurons 30 years later: implications and applications
Open accessAbstract
Mirror neurons (MNs) were first described in a seminal paper in 1992 as a class of monkey premotor cells discharging during both action execution and observation. Despite their debated origin and function, recent studies in several species, from birds to humans, revealed that beyond MNs properly so called, a variety of cell types distributed among multiple motor, sensory, and emotional brain areas form a 'mirror mechanism' more complex and flexible than originally thought, which has an evolutionarily conserved role in social interaction. Here, we trace the current limits and envisage the future trends of this discovery, showing that it inspired translational research and the development of new neurorehabilitation approaches, and constitutes a point of no return in social and affective neuroscience.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Action recognition in the premotor cortex
Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., & Rizzolatti, G. (1996) · Brain · doi:10.1093/brain/119.2.593 · Cited by 4,968
Self-citationPremotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions
Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Gallese, V., & Fogassi, L. (1996) · Cognitive Brain Research · doi:10.1016/0926-6410(95)00038-0 · Cited by 4,870
Self-citationUnderstanding motor events: a neurophysiological study
di Pellegrino, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (1992) · Experimental Brain Research · doi:10.1007/bf00230027 · Cited by 3,539
Self-citationBoth of Us Disgusted in My Insula
Wicker, B., Keysers, C., Plailly, J., Royet, J.-P., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (2003) · Neuron · doi:10.1016/s0896-6273(03)00679-2 · Cited by 2,185
Self-citationParietal Lobe: From Action Organization to Intention Understanding
Fogassi, L., Ferrari, P. F., Gesierich, B., Rozzi, S., Chersi, F., & Rizzolatti, G. (2005) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1106138 · Cited by 1,990
Hearing Sounds, Understanding Actions: Action Representation in Mirror Neurons
Kohler, E., Keysers, C., Umiltà, M. A., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (2002) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1070311 · Cited by 1,801
Self-citationMotion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience
Freedberg, D., & Gallese, V. (2007) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.02.003 · Cited by 1,254
Self-citationSingle-Neuron Responses in Humans during Execution and Observation of Actions
Mukamel, R., Ekstrom, A. D., Kaplan, J., Iacoboni, M., & Fried, I. (2010) · Current Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.02.045 · Cited by 1,178 · cited 1×
“The human mirror mechanism Most studies stemming from the MN discovery have been carried out in humans, but only one recorded single-neuron activity while patients executed or observed hand-grasping actions and facial emotional expressions, providing direct evidence of the mirror mechanism in several very different hu…”
Predictive coding: an account of the mirror neuron system
Kilner, J. M., Friston, K. J., & Frith, C. D. (2007) · Cognitive Processing · doi:10.1007/s10339-007-0170-2 · Cited by 1,134
Active perception: sensorimotor circuits as a cortical basis for language
Pulvermüller, F., & Fadiga, L. (2010) · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn2811 · Cited by 1,048
Cited by
Biological principles for music and mental health
Bowling, D. L. (2023) · Translational Psychiatry · doi:10.1038/s41398-023-02671-4 · Cited by 64
Eagle, T., Baltaxe-Admony, L. B., & Ringland, K. E. (2024) · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing · doi:10.1145/3689648 · Cited by 34
Beyond Cognitive Load Theory: Why Learning Needs More than Memory Management
Sortwell, A., Gkintoni, E., Díaz-García, J., Ellerton, P., Ferraz, R., & Hine, G. (2026) · Brain Sciences · doi:10.3390/brainsci16010109 · Cited by 20
Vaisvaser, S. (2025) · Frontiers in Psychiatry · doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1726099 · Cited by 4
Cross-robot behavior adaptation through intention alignment
Chen, X., Gao, Y., Liu, H., Yang, F., Ghadirzadeh, A., Yang, J., Liang, B., Zhang, C., Lam, T. L., & Zhu, S.-C. (2026) · Science Robotics · doi:10.1126/scirobotics.adv2250
Metadata
- Authors
- Bonini, L., Rotunno, C., Arcuri, E., & Gallese, V.
- Venue
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2022-09
- Volume
- 26
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 767-781
- ISSN
- 1364-6613 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4284706306
- Cited by
- 316
- References
- 134
- FWCI
- 12.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Mirror neurons 30 years later: implications and applications. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.tics.2022.06.003
- The paper
- Bonini, L., Rotunno, C., Arcuri, E., & Gallese, V. (2022). Mirror neurons 30 years later: implications and applications. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.06.003
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
