Building a motor simulation de novo: Observation of dance by dancers

Abstract

Research on action simulation identifies brain areas that are active while imagining or performing simple overlearned actions. Are areas engaged during imagined movement sensitive to the amount of actual physical practice? In the present study, participants were expert dancers who learned and rehearsed novel, complex whole-body dance sequences 5 h a week across 5 weeks. Brain activity was recorded weekly by fMRI as dancers observed and imagined performing different movement sequences. Half these sequences were rehearsed and half were unpracticed control movements. After each trial, participants rated how well they could perform the movement. We hypothesized that activity in premotor areas would increase as participants observed and simulated movements that they had learnt outside the scanner. Dancers' ratings of their ability to perform rehearsed sequences, but not the control sequences, increased with training. When dancers observed and simulated another dancer's movements, brain regions classically associated with both action simulation and action observation were active, including inferior parietal lobule, cingulate and supplementary motor areas, ventral premotor cortex, superior temporal sulcus and primary motor cortex. Critically, inferior parietal lobule and ventral premotor activity was modulated as a function of dancers' ratings of their own ability to perform the observed movements and their motor experience. These data demonstrate that a complex motor resonance can be built de novo over 5 weeks of rehearsal. Furthermore, activity in premotor and parietal areas during action simulation is enhanced by the ability to execute a learned action irrespective of stimulus familiarity or semantic label.

Experience-based priming of body parts: A study of action imitation

“…For example, neuroimaging research has shown that mirror neuron system activation by action observation varies with the observer's expertise. Greater activation in premotor and parietal cortices has been shown for ballet and capoeira dancers observing actions which they had been trained to perform (Calvo-Merino et al, 2005), dancers observing actions they rated they could perform well (Cross et al, 2006), and piano players observing piano playing (Haslinger et al, 2005). Järveläinen et al (2004) found that the degree of primary motor cortex activation when observing actions involving chopsticks correlated with the amount of recent experience with using chopsticks.…”

Pitch underlies activation of the vocal system during affective vocalization

“…Finally, given that the majority of the literature on affective prosody focuses on perception alone, we were interested in comparing the brain network for affective vocalizing with that for affective perception. Considering the general propensity of sensorimotor systems to activate during both action execution and observation (Cross et al, 2006;Aziz-Zadeh et al, 2010;Menenti et al, 2011), we performed exploratory analyses to search for exclusivity and overlap in our vocal production and perceptual experiments.…”

Sensorimotor learning and the ontogeny of the mirror neuron system

“…A complementary conclusion can be drawn from the results of Cross and colleagues [16] who scanned dancers repeatedly over a five-week period during which they learned a new modern dance. The researchers found that dancers' reported motor ability to perform the dance was correlated with BOLD response in mirror areas during observation of the dance.…”