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Watson CE, Cardillo ER, Bromberger B, et al. The specificity of action knowledge in sensory and motor systems. Front Psychol. 2014;5:494doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00494.
Watson, C. E., Cardillo, E. R., Bromberger, B., & Chatterjee, A. (2014). The specificity of action knowledge in sensory and motor systems. Frontiers in psychology, 5494. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00494
Watson, Christine E, et al. "The specificity of action knowledge in sensory and motor systems." Frontiers in psychology vol. 5 (2014): 494. doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00494
Watson CE, Cardillo ER, Bromberger B, Chatterjee A. The specificity of action knowledge in sensory and motor systems. Front Psychol. 2014 May 26;5:494. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00494. eCollection 2014. PMID: 24904506; PMCID: PMC4033265.
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Front Psychol. 2014 May 26;5:494. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00494. eCollection 2014.

The specificity of action knowledge in sensory and motor systems.

Frontiers in psychology

Christine E Watson, Eileen R Cardillo, Bianca Bromberger, Anjan Chatterjee

Affiliations

  1. Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, Einstein Healthcare Network Elkins Park, PA, USA ; Department of Neurology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  2. Department of Neurology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA.

PMID: 24904506 PMCID: PMC4033265 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00494

Abstract

Neuroimaging studies have found that sensorimotor systems are engaged when participants observe actions or comprehend action language. However, most of these studies have asked the binary question of whether action concepts are embodied or not, rather than whether sensory and motor areas of the brain contain graded amounts of information during putative action simulations. To address this question, we used repetition suppression (RS) functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine if functionally-localized motor movement and visual motion regions-of-interest (ROI) and two anatomical ROIs (inferior frontal gyrus, IFG; left posterior middle temporal gyrus, pMTG) were sensitive to changes in the exemplar (e.g., two different people "kicking") or representational format (e.g., photograph or schematic drawing of someone "kicking") within pairs of action images. We also investigated whether concrete versus more symbolic depictions of actions (i.e., photographs or schematic drawings) yielded different patterns of activation throughout the brain. We found that during a conceptual task, sensory and motor systems represent actions at different levels of specificity. While the visual motion ROI did not exhibit RS to different exemplars of the same action or to the same action depicted by different formats, the motor movement ROI did. These effects are consistent with "person-specific" action simulations: if the motor system is recruited for action understanding, it does so by activating one's own motor program for an action. We also observed significant repetition enhancement within the IFG ROI to different exemplars or formats of the same action, a result that may indicate additional cognitive processing on these trials. Finally, we found that the recruitment of posterior brain regions by action concepts depends on the format of the input: left lateral occipital cortex and right supramarginal gyrus responded more strongly to symbolic depictions of actions than concrete ones.

Keywords: actions; functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); motor system; semantic memory; visual motion

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