Neural model for the visual recognition of hand actions

The visual recognition of goal-directed movements is crucial for the learning of actions, and possibly for the understanding of the intentions and goals of others. The discovery of mirror neurons has stimulated a vast amount of research investigating possible links between action perception and action execution [1,2]. However, it remains largely unknown what is the real extent of this putative visuo-motor interaction during visual perception of actions and which relevant computational functions are instead accomplished by possibly purely visual processing.