Turella, Luca and Rumiati, Raffaella and Lingnau, Angelika (2020) Hierarchical Action Encoding Within the Human Brain. CEREBRAL CORTEX, 30 (5). pp. 2924-2938. ISSN 1047-3211, 1460-2199
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Humans are able to interact with objects with extreme flexibility. To achieve this ability, the brain does not only control specific muscular patterns, but it also needs to represent the abstract goal of an action, irrespective of its implementation. It is debated, however, how abstract action goals are implemented in the brain. To address this question, we used multivariate pattern analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Human participants performed grasping actions (precision grip, whole hand grip) with two different wrist orientations (canonical, rotated), using either the left or right hand. This design permitted to investigate a hierarchical organization consisting of three levels of abstraction: 1) "concrete action" encoding; 2) "effector-dependent goal" encoding (invariant to wrist orientation); and 3) "effector-independent goal" encoding (invariant to effector and wrist orientation). We found that motor cortices hosted joint encoding of concrete actions and of effector-dependent goals, while the parietal lobe housed a convergence of all three representations, comprising action goals within and across effectors. The left lateral occipito-temporal cortex showed effector-independent goal encoding, but no convergence across the three levels of representation. Our results support a hierarchical organization of action encoding, shedding light on the neural substrates supporting the extraordinary flexibility of human hand behavior.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | POSTERIOR PARIETAL CORTEX; ABSTRACT ACTION REPRESENTATIONS; EFFECTOR-SPECIFIC ORGANIZATION; MOTOR IMAGERY; OCCIPITOTEMPORAL CORTEX; CORTICAL CONTROL; HAND; PREHENSION; INFORMATION; SPECIALIZATION; action; fMRI; grasping; motor system; MVPA |
| Subjects: | 100 Philosophy & psychology > 150 Psychology |
| Divisions: | Human Sciences > Institut für Psychologie Human Sciences > Institut für Psychologie > Lehrstuhl für Cognitive Neuroscience – Prof. Dr. Angelika Lingnau |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Mar 2021 12:25 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Mar 2021 12:25 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/44644 |
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