Watch and Learn: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning from Others' Actions.

The mirror neuron system has dominated understanding of observational learning from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Our review highlights the value of observational learning frameworks that integrate a more diverse and distributed set of cognitive and brain systems, including those implicated in sensorimotor transformations, as well as in more general processes such as executive control, reward, and social cognition. We argue that understanding how observational learning occurs in the real world will require neuroscientific frameworks that consider how visuomotor processes interface with more general aspects of cognition, as well as how learning context and action complexity shape mechanisms supporting learning from watching others. Understanding how the human brain translates visual information into skilled motor performance has been assisted and constrained by the discovery of mirror neurons. Emerging evidence highlights how observational motor learning involves a far more diffuse network of brain regions and cognitive processes, which are shaped by the context and complexity of the motor task to be learned. A greater emphasis on combining functional decomposition and functional integration approaches should facilitate paradigms and discoveries that move us closer toward understanding how we learn from watching others in complex, real-world scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]