Mirror neurons have been described for the first time twenty years go in the monkey ventral premotor
area F5. Subsequently they have been recorded also in area PFG of the inferior parietal cortex, that is anatomically reciprocally connected with F5. Mirror neurons of both areas match observation and execution of hand and mouth motor acts, such as grasping, manipulating, biting, enabling the monkey to achieve an automatic understanding of others’ goal directed acts. Further investigations showed that there are specific categories of mirror neurons, one responding not only to the observation but also the sound of motor acts, another activated by the observation of oro facial communicative gestures.
More recent studies allowed to increase our knowledge on mirror neuron functioning. First of all, by recording these neurons during observation and execution of complex action sequences it has been shown that their discharge is modulated by the final goal of the action in which grasping is embedded, suggesting that mirror neurons can also encode the motor intentions of other agents. Second, mirror neurons can be modulated by the distance at which the observed motor act is performed, suggesting a possible role in triggering different types of spaceLrelated behavioural reactions. Finally, the response of mirror neurons appears to be also sensitive to the perspective from which the observed motor act is seen, suggesting that while the main function of these neurons is that of encoding others’ actions, their modulation can also contribute, together with high order visual cortical areas, to a better encoding of the visual details of these actions.
Knowledge about upcoming actions is fundamentally important to predict their fate ahead of their realization and thus to anticipate rather than react to the actions of other individuals. Influential theoretical models suggest that the human motor system is ‘‘designed’’ to be an anticipation device and that we predict what others are doing by using our own motor system as an internal forward model.
Multimodal, perceptuo motor, multiple duty cells (mirror neurons) may play an important function also in action anticipation. I will present data indicating that the fine tuning of such resonant systems may underpin the superior predictive ability of individuals who become excellent in a given cognitive motor domain. I will focus on phenomena and neural correlates of the anticipatory action mapping in elite athletes and expert pianists and provide support to the notion that one’s own sensorimotor representations are used for the anticipatory read out of actions and intentions of others.
HUMAN EXCELLENCE 
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