Neural Correlates of Familiar and Unfamiliar Action in Infancy

Abstract

Behavioral evidence shows that experience with an action shapes action perception. Neural mirroring has been suggested as a mechanism underlying this behavioral phenomenon. Suppression of EEG power in the mu frequency band, an index of motor activation, typically reflects neural mirroring. However, contradictory findings exist regarding the association between mu suppression and motor familiarity in infant EEG studies. In this study, we investigated the neural underpinnings reflecting the role of familiarity on action perception. We measured neural processing of familiar (grasp) and novel (tool-use) actions in 9-and-12-month-old infants. Specifically, we measured infants’ distinct motor/visual activity and explored functional connectivity associated with these processes. Mu suppression was stronger for grasping than tool-use, while significant mu and occipital alpha (indexing visual activity) suppression were evident for both actions. Interestingly, selective visual-motor functional connectivity was found during observation of familiar action, a pattern not observed for novel action. Thus, the neural correlates of perception of familiar actions may be best understood in terms of a functional neural network, rather than isolated regional activity.Our findings provide novel insights on analytic approaches for identifying motor-specific neural activity while also considering neural networks involved in observing motorically familiar versus actions.

Infant action understanding: the roles of active training and motor development

“…For instance, many studies provide evidence in support of the notion that variation in infants' motor skills is associated with sensorimotor activity during observation of action that infants have prolonged experience with (van Elk et al, 2008;Cannon et al, 2016;Upshaw et al, 2016). Furthermore, recent infant EEG studies showed that visual and motor areas were more connected than other control circuits during observation of familiar grasping action in infants (Debnath et al, 2019;Chung et al, 2022), but not during observation of an unfamiliar caneuse action (Chung et al, 2022). It is also found that infants more competent in grasping objects showed higher levels of motor-visual coupling during action anticipation of both grasping and cane-use action (Colomer et al, 2023).…”