The goals of MIRROR are:

1) to realize an artificial system that learns to communicate with humans by means of body gestures and
2) to study the mechanisms used by the brain to learn and represent gestures.

The biological base is the existence in primates pre-motor cortex of a motor resonant system, called mirror neurons, activated both during execution of goal directed actions and during observation of similar actions performed by others. This unified representation may sub serve the learning of goal directed actions during development and the recognition of motor acts, when visually perceived. In MIRROR we investigate this ontogenetic pathway in two ways:

1) by realizing a system that learns to move AND to understand movements on the basis of the visually perceived motion and the associated motor commands and
2) by correlated electrophysiological experiments.