Critical brain regions for action recognition: lesion symptom mapping in left hemisphere stroke

Abstract

A number of conflicting claims have been advanced regarding the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobe and posterior middle temporal gyrus in action recognition, driven in part by an ongoing debate about the capacities of putative mirror systems that match observed and planned actions. We report data from 43 left hemisphere stroke patients in two action recognition tasks in which they heard and saw an action word ('hammering') and selected from two videoclips the one corresponding to the word. In the spatial recognition task, foils contained errors of body posture or movement amplitude/timing. In the semantic recognition task, foils were semantically related (sawing). Participants also performed a comprehension control task requiring matching of the same verbs to objects (hammer). Using regression analyses controlling for both the comprehension control task and lesion volume, we demonstrated that performance in the semantic gesture recognition task was predicted by per cent damage to the posterior temporal lobe, whereas the spatial gesture recognition task was predicted by per cent damage to the inferior parietal lobule. A whole-brain voxel-based lesion symptom-mapping analysis suggested that the semantic and spatial gesture recognition tasks were associated with lesioned voxels in the posterior middle temporal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule, respectively. The posterior middle temporal gyrus appears to serve as a central node in the association of actions and meanings. The inferior parietal lobule, held to be a homologue of the monkey parietal mirror neuron system, is critical for encoding object-related postures and movements, a relatively circumscribed aspect of gesture recognition. The inferior frontal gyrus, on the other hand, was not predictive of performance in any task, suggesting that previous claims regarding its role in action recognition may require refinement.

Functional connectivity associated with hand shape generation: Imitating novel hand postures and pantomiming tool grips challenge different nodes of a shared neural network

“…Posterior temporal lobe activation is typically found in studies assessing semantic action knowledge and recent publications emphasized the visual format of these action representations in pMTG (Binkofski and Buxbaum, 2013;Buxbaum et al, 2014;Kable et al, 2005;Kalenine et al, 2010). The proposed functional link between pMTG and extrastriate regions is in agreement with the finding that the highest (of albeit weak) pMTG resonance was observed with the lingual gyrus and the inferior precunei, whereas correlations of pMTG with the frontal and parietal ROIs were very modest.…”

Closely overlapping responses to tools and hands in left lateral occipitotemporal cortex

“…Alternatively, left LOTC might encode the characteristic rigid motion of tool actions (Beauchamp et al 2002), although such an account does not readily explain the strong response to hands, which are instead associated with articulated biological motion. Finally, left LOTC may represent semantic information representing action meaning (Kalenine et al 2010;Martin 2007;Noppeney 2008;Valyear and Culham 2010). Evidence for this view comes from neuropsychological studies showing that lesions to left prefrontal, left parietal, as well as left posterior middle temporal cortex can compromise retrieval of conceptual action knowledge (Campanella et al 2010;Kalenine et al 2010;Tranel et al 2003).…”

Perception of co-speech gestures in aphasic patients: A visual exploration study during the observation of dyadic conversations

“…Furthermore, the posterior STS has been reported to be part of the action observation network (Georgescu et al, 2014) and incorporated in a neural network activated in social interaction (Leube et al, 2012). In addition to that, there is evidence from studies on patients with brain lesions that the perisylvian region is a critical site for gesture processing (Kal enine, Buxbaum, & Coslett, 2010;Nelissen et al, 2010;Saygin, Dick, Wilson, Dronkers, & Bates, 2003).…”