Parietofrontal pathways play an important role in visually guided motor control. In this pathway, hand manipulation-related neurons in the inferior parietal lobule represent 3-D properties of an object and motor patterns to grasp it. Furthermore, mirror neurons show visual responses that are concerned with the actions of others and motor-related activity during execution of the same grasping action. Because both of these categories of neurons integrate visual and motor signals, these neurons may play a role in motor control based on visual feedback signals. The aim of this study was to investigate whether these neurons in inferior parietal lobule including the anterior intraparietal area and PFG of macaques represent visual images of the monkey's own hand during a self-generated grasping action. We recorded 235 neurons related to hand manipulation tasks. Of these, 54 responded to video clips of the monkey's own hand action, the same as visual feedback during that action or clips of the experimenter's hand action in a lateral view. Of these 54 neurons, 25 responded to video clips of the monkey's own hand, even without an image of the target object. We designated these 25 neurons as “hand-type.” Thirty-three of 54 neurons that were defined as mirror neurons showed visual responses to the experimenter's action and motor responses. Thirteen of these mirror neurons were classified as hand-type. These results suggest that activity of hand manipulation-related and mirror neurons in anterior intraparietal/PFG plays a fundamental role in monitoring one's own body state based on visual feedback.

Parietal cortex contributes to body representations by integrating visual and somatosensory inputs. Because mirror neurons in ventral premotor and parietal cortices represent visual images of others' actions on the intrinsic motor representation of the self, this matching system may play important roles in recognizing actions performed by others. However, where and how the brain represents others' bodies and correlates self and other body representations remain unclear. We expected that a population of visuotactile neurons in simian parietal cortex would represent not only own but others' body parts. We first searched for parietal visuotactile bimodal neurons in the ventral intraparietal area and area 7b of monkeys, and then examined the activity of these neurons while monkeys were observing visual or tactile stimuli placed on the experimenter's body parts. Some bimodal neurons with receptive fields (RFs) anchored on the monkey's body exhibited visual responses matched to corresponding body parts of the experimenter, and visual RFs near that body part existed in the peripersonal space within approximately 30 cm from the body surface. These findings suggest that the brain could use self representation as a reference for perception of others' body parts in parietal cortex. These neurons may contribute to spatial matching between the bodies of the self and others in both action recognition and imitation.