Dynamics of scientific research on mirror neurons

For more than thirty years, a huge stream of research has enlightened the functions of Mirror Neurons (MNs) in humans and animals. Criticisms have been published, especially since 2010, targeting neuropsychological hypotheses of the MNs which refer to empathy and mind-reading (i.e., high-level processes of action understanding), as well as the extrapolation of the MNs in an attempt to explain the etiology of psychiatric disorders, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia. One would expect that these criticisms be considered with a time lag in the field of psychiatry because they were not originally formulated in that field, that these hypotheses have gained significant popularity, and that criticism of the “broken mirror theory” of ASD emerged at a later stage. We conducted an analysis of publications on MNs on PubMed. We identified 2,595 publications on “Mirror Neuron” from January 1995 until the 27th of May 2023; 443 concerned psychiatric disorders and another 550 publications were related to high-level processes of action understanding. We found no time lag in publications on high-level processes of action understanding of MNs between the peaks of publications on psychiatric disorders and all the other publications (both peaks in June 2014). Our findings indicate effective knowledge dissemination between psychiatric research and other research fields.