Modulation of Brain Activity during Action Observation: Influence of Perspective, Transitivity and Meaningfulness

Abstract

The coupling process between observed and performed actions is thought to be performed by a fronto-parietal perception-action system including regions of the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule. When investigating the influence of the movements' characteristics on this process, most research on action observation has focused on only one particular variable even though the type of movements we observe can vary on several levels. By manipulating the visual perspective, transitivity and meaningfulness of observed movements in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study we aimed at investigating how the type of movements and the visual perspective can modulate brain activity during action observation in healthy individuals. Importantly, we used an active observation task where participants had to subsequently execute or imagine the observed movements. Our results show that the fronto-parietal regions of the perception action system were mostly recruited during the observation of meaningless actions while visual perspective had little influence on the activity within the perception-action system. Simultaneous investigation of several sources of modulation during active action observation is probably an approach that could lead to a greater ecological comprehension of this important sensorimotor process.

Effects of Context on Visuomotor Interference Depends on the Perspective of Observed Actions

“…In line with our results, a few studies have reported no differences in the activity within the action-observation network when egocentric and allocentric perspectives were compared [40], [41]. Moreover, it has previously been found that the effect of perspective varies across paradigms [3], [38] so that in some circumstances, actions observed in allocentric perspective can induce strong interference between the visual system and the motor system.…”

Doing, seeing, or both: Effects of learning condition on subsequent action perception

“…(Note that the contrasts we performed are not entirely orthogonal with respect to each other, and so it is not meaningful to directly compare the resulting activation maps, e.g., in order to identify overlapping regions.) These regions correspond to the core regions of the socalled human mirror system (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004), which are commonly activated during action observation as well as action execution (Buccino, Vogt, et al, 2004;Chong, Cunnington, Williams, Kanwisher, & Mattingley, 2008;Dinstein et al, 2007Dinstein et al, , 2008Gazzola & Keysers, 2009;Grezes & Decety, 2001;Hétu, Mercier, Eugène, Michon, & Jackson, 2011;Kilner et al, 2009;Lingnau et al, 2009). The regions responding to action observation seen in fMRI studies also typically include the superior temporal sulcus (Buccino et al, 2001;Cross et al, 2006;Grezes & Decety, 2001) and the cerebellum (Buccino, Vogt, et al, 2004;Calvo-Merino et al, 2006;, which we also identified in this study.…”

“…The authors argued that view-dependent neurons represent an intermediate step in the formation of view independence. Also, a recent human fMRI study (Hétu et al, 2011) suggests that the activity in frontal and parietal visuomotor areas is equally strong for first-and thirdperson visual perspectives of hands executing several different types of actions (transitive, nontransitive, and meaningless hand movements). However, using multivoxel pattern analysis, Oosterhof, Tipper, and Downing (2012) found action-specific cross-modal visual-motor representations in the ventral premotor cortex only for first-person but not for third-person views of actions.…”

Influence of perspective on the neural correlates of motor resonance during natural action observation

“…The observation-only condition of the latter study resulted in the reverse pattern (greater activity for anatomical compared to specular actions), suggesting that imitation modifies activity patterns for action representation (Koski et al, 2003). Still other studies reported only visual-field related occipital differences for the firstversus third-person perspective, whereas motor-related areas were perspective invariant (Hetu, Mercier, Eugene, Michon, & Jackson, 2011;Macuga & Frey, 2011).…”