Abstract: One of the basic tasks in neuroscience is to clarify the neural mechanism of action understanding in primates. This clarification enables people to better understand the essence of the advanced cognitive behaviors which primates specifically have evolved. As for primates, recognition and understanding of actions performed by their conspecifics is a fundamental building block of social behavior. However, the neural and functional mechanisms underlying this ability are still poorly understood. Because of the critical role of the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) in the cognitive process of primates, it became the hot point of social cognitive neuroscience and cognitive anthropology. Neurophysiologic and brain-imaging studies in succession have indicated the mediation of mirror neuron system (MNS) in the process of action understanding in human adults and monkeys. This paper reviewed the past works of Mirror Neuron research in action recognition and understanding and introduced some recent discoveries about its impacts on the evolution and development of action understanding. Meanwhile, this paper analyzed some problems in current experiments and extended the prospect of researches in the action understanding in primates.

Key words: Mirror neuron system; Action recognition; Action understanding; Common coding theory