Abstract: The discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s has led to much excitement in the cognitive neuroscience. Mirror neurons have received a great deal of attention from specialists both in the scientific field and public media. More and more abilities have been attributed to these neurons, they are even hailed as “do for psychology what DNA did for biology”. And a series of studies related to them have given rise to “a revolution in understanding social behavior”. Mirror neuron have been ascribed a wide variety of functions, such as action understanding, imitation, empathy, theory of mind, language evolution, telepathy, self-awareness, substance use disorders, etc. Mirror neurons are viewed as “holy grail” of cognitive science. Although, mirror neurons are widely assumed to play a key role in social cognition, florescence of often-aggressive debates have also arisen in this field. This review shows that current data about mirror neurons are very mixed and those studies using weakly localised measures to examine the functions of mirror neuron (system) are hard to interpret. Firstly, some theorists misuse and abuse the operational definition of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a class of visuomotor neurons activated by both the execution and the passive observation of object-related actions. Cells having this property were only found in macaques within the premotor cortex (area F5), and in the rostral part of the inferior parietal cortex (PF). Secondly, the idea that mirror neurons are existing in human being remains controversial, Though the human homolog of inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and inferior parietal lobule (IPL) can be seen as classic human mirror neuron system. We systematically review the empirical foundations of mirror neuron researches, it turns out that unless someone can manage to evade all of the ethical, technical, and procedural limitations imposed on human brain research, no complementary research can be carried out to demonstrate the existence of mirror neurons in human brain convincingly with microelectrodes or any other technique operations at the neuronal level. Last but not the least, claiming the mirror mechanism plays a crucial role in understanding the behavior of others does not imply that there are no other mechanisms involved in action understanding. Some of these mechanisms based on the social brain are basic and not be ignored, relying on the association between a given stimulus and its corresponding effect. Based on this, the mirror neuron (system) and its mirror mechanisms neither can be used to account for empathy, imitation and mindreading, nor can explain other social cognition phenomena. It’s an outdated ideology as modularity of mind. The future study for mirror neurons must attempt to answer the following questions. (1) How can an agent make a distinction between the intention of self-action and those of others? And how can mirror neuron (system) and other social brains cooperate in this processing? (2) How can an agent make an understanding outcome prediction of action, it isn’t depends not at all on the action itself, but on the context which action embedded, so inferential reasoning or embodied simulation carry out processing?

Key words: Mirror Neurons, Action Understanding, Action Imitation, Empathy, Mindreading, Modularity

摘要： 镜像神经元作为近二十年来神经科学领域内最重要的发现之一，相关的一系列研究掀起了一场“理解社会行为的革命”。然而，通过系统考察镜像神经元最初的操作性定义、基本功能及其实验证据，发现许多研究者对于镜像神经元的定义存在误解，人类脑中是否存在镜像神经元及其功能依然是当前学术界的争议焦点。迄今仍然缺乏令人信服的证据表明镜像神经元（或系统）就是动作理解、动作模仿、共情以及读心的直接神经机制。因此，将镜像神经元视为“认知科学的圣杯”的主张是一种落后的模块论意识形态，只能催生新的“神经神话”。

关键词: 镜像神经元, 动作理解, 动作模仿, 共情, 读心, 模块论