Neurology,
Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami,
USA
Nahab and Cooper
The neural mechanisms
responsible for spontaneous yawning as well as
contagious yawning are not well characterized.
Neuroimaging is an essential tool for helping to
identify the seminal neural structures and their
inter-related functions to carry out this
complex stereotyped motor program. Studies to
date have explored the structural neural
correlates of yawning through a series of
lesion-based case reports and identified
participatory structures at various levels of
the central nervous system. Functional
neuroimaging methods like fMRI have also shed
led on the genesis of contagious yawning, though
cohesive models explaining the neural mechanisms
of contagious motor programs such as yawning
remain limited.
We conducted a slow event-related fMRI
experiment with naïve subjects passively
viewing yawn and various other control videos
along with correlative behavioral testing.
Specifically associated with the viewing of the
contagious yawn was an area of activation in the
ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These findings
suggest a role for the prefrontal cortex in the
processing of contagious yawning, while
demonstrating a unique automaticity in the
processing of contagious motor programs which
take place independently of mirror neuron
networks.
