In other words, there is a high degree of association between motor commands, on the one hand, and the sight of the movements initiated by those motor commands, on the other – e.g. the experience of moving one’s hand is tightly associated with the sight of a moving hand. If this is the case, then the findings in question may not reflect a dedicated mechanism for action understanding but may instead be a mere byproduct of domain-general associative learning – and activation of the MNS would result directly from the visual perception of movements without being shaped by or contributing to the representation of intentions or any other mental states. Consistent with this hypothesis, earlier work by the same research group has demonstrated that the response profiles of neural circuits in the MNS can be modulated, or even reversed, by relatively short training periods (Catmur et al., 2007).