Dissociation of extrastriate body and biological-motion selective areas by manipulation of visual-motor congruency

Abstract

To date, several posterior brain regions have been identified that play a role in the visual perception of other people and their movements. The aim of the present study is to understand how these areas may be involved in relating body movements to their visual consequences. We used fMRI to examine the extrastriate body area (EBA), the fusiform body area (FBA), and an area in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) that responds to patterns of human biological motion. Each area was localized in individual participants with independent scans. In the main experiment, participants performed and/or viewed simple, intransitive hand actions while in the scanner. An MR-compatible camera with a near-egocentric view of the participant's hand was used to manipulate the relationship between motor output and the visual stimulus. Participants’ only view of their hands was via this camera. In the Compatible condition, participants viewed their own live hand movements projected onto the screen. In the Incompatible condition, participants viewed actions that were different from the actions they were executing. In pSTS, the BOLD response in the Incompatible condition was significantly higher than in the Compatible condition. Further, the response in the Compatible condition was below baseline, and no greater than that found in a control condition in which hand actions were performed without any visual input. This indicates a strong suppression in pSTS of the response to the visual stimulus that arises from one's own actions. In contrast, in EBA and FBA, we found a large but equivalent response to the Compatible and Incompatible conditions, and this response was the same as that elicited in a control condition in which hand actions were viewed passively, with no concurrent motor task. These findings indicate that, in contrast to pSTS, EBA and FBA are decoupled from motor systems. Instead we propose that their role is limited to perceptual analysis of body-related visual input.

A Causal Role for the Extrastriate Body Area in Detecting People in Real-World Scenes

“…In Experiment 3, a scene-selective region of transverse occipital sulcus (TOS;Epstein et al, 2005) was also defined, by contrasting the response to scenes with that to images of chairs. Peak voxels were selected within anatomical regions referring to previous studies (Epstein et al, 2005;Kontaris et al, 2009) and used to position the TMS coil (mean coordinates ϭ 33 (1.1), Ϫ77 (2.0), 14 (1.8)).…”

The influence of action observation on action execution: Dissociating the contribution of action on perception, perception on action, and resolving conflict

“…Interestingly, fMRI studies on the imitation-inhibition task so far did not reveal activation in EBA/MT Kontaris, Wiggett, & Downing, 2009;Spengler et al, 2010;). We think that this is due to the fact that fMRI is less sensitive to such subtle changes.…”

Different brain structures related to self- and external-agency attribution: a brief review and meta-analysis

“…In addition, we used the ''related articles'' function on PubMed to identify additional papers. This search revealed seven additional papers (Corradi-Dell'Acqua et al 2008;Kontaris et al 2009;Matsuzawa et al 2005;Nahab et al 2010;Spengler et al 2009;Yomogida et al 2010;Tsakiris et al 2010) making a total of 31 studies.…”

“…For example Farrer and Frith (2002) and Farrer et al (2003) reported greater insula activation for self-versus other-agency attribution, Leube and coworkers (2003a, b) found a negative correlation between putamen activity and the extent of temporal delay of the visual feedback, Kontaris et al (2009) showed activation in parieto-occipital sulcus for congruent compared to incongruent feedback while other studies did not report any significant activation when directly comparing conditions of coherent versus distorted feedback (Bralslev et al 2006;David et al 2007;Nahab et al 2010). …”

“…Most of these studies have manipulated the action-effect coupling by systematically varying the delay (Leube et al 2003a), the morphology (David et al 2007;Farrer et al 2003) or the congruence (Farrer and Frith 2002;Kontaris et al 2009) of the visual feedback. By doing so they disrupt the sense of self-agency or induce an external attribution or judgment of action effect.…”