Low or High-Level Motor Coding? The Role of Stimulus Complexity

Amoruso, Lucía; Finisguerra, Alessandra

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2019.00332

Cited by 28 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…However, Amoruso and Finisguerra (2019) argued that motor resonance only reflects an automatic replica of observed actions, if observed in isolation, but that it can be modulated by topdown inputs in presence of contextual cues. Our results support this hypothesis: Weight-driven motor resonance was present when weight expectations were never challenged (control group), but turned out to be suppressed when a size-weight mismatch was introduced (baseline group).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensorimotor Expectations Bias Motor Resonance during Observation of Object Lifting: The Causal Role of pSTS

et al. 2020

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Transcranial magnetic stimulation studies have highlighted that corticospinal excitability is increased during observation of object lifting, an effect termed "motor resonance." This facilitation is driven by movement features indicative of object weight, such as object size or observed movement kinematics. Here, we investigated in 35 humans (23 females) how motor resonance is altered when the observer's weight expectations, based on visual information, do not match the actual object weight as revealed by the observed movement kinematics. Our results highlight that motor resonance is not robustly driven by object weight but easily masked by a suppressive mechanism reflecting the correctness of weight expectations. Subsequently, we investigated in 24 humans (14 females) whether this suppressive mechanism was driven by higher-order cortical areas. For this, we induced "virtual lesions" to either the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) before having participants perform the task. Importantly, virtual lesion of pSTS eradicated this suppressive mechanism and restored object weight-driven motor resonance. In addition, DLPFC virtual lesion eradicated any modulation of motor resonance. This indicates that motor resonance is heavily mediated by top-down inputs from both pSTS and DLPFC. Together, these findings shed new light on the theorized cortical network driving motor resonance. That is, our findings highlight that motor resonance is not only driven by the putative human mirror neuron network consisting of the primary motor and premotor cortices as well as the anterior intraparietal sulcus, but also by top-down input from pSTS and DLPFC.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensorimotor Expectations Bias Motor Resonance during Observation of Object Lifting: The Causal Role of pSTS

et al. 2020

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“…To build up their predictions, participants were instructed to carefully pay attention to both aspects of the scene: the agent's hand preshaping and the contextual information in which the action was embedded. It is worth noting that, in keeping with previous studies (11)(12)(13), correct responses were defined by hand configurations in terms of precision vs. power grips, not by the context. Thus, when the participants observed a precision grip of a cup, "to drink" was the correct response irrespective of the breakfast or cleaning scenario.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Spatial Frequency Contributions To Action Compmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…The current study builds on previous evidence showing that corticospinal excitability (CSE) in the motor system becomes differentially modulated depending on the context in which an action is observed (for a review, see ref. 13). Briefly, in a series of studies, we found that the observation of movement kinematics occurring in congruent contexts (i.e., reaching-to-grasp a cup full of coffee with a precision grip) increases motor CSE facilitation, while its observation in incongruent contexts (i.e., reaching-to-grasp an empty cup with a precision grip) results in decreased motor facilitation compared to observing the same kinematics in neutral contexts.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 96%

Spatial frequency tuning of motor responses reveals differential contribution of dorsal and ventral systems to action comprehension

Amoruso

Finisguerra

Urgesi

2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Understanding object-directed actions performed by others is central to everyday life. This ability is thought to rely on the interaction between the dorsal action observation network (AON) and a ventral object recognition pathway. On this view, the AON would encode action kinematics, and the ventral pathway, the most likely intention afforded by the objects. However, experimental evidence supporting this model is still scarce. Here, we aimed to disentangle the contribution of dorsal vs. ventral pathways to action comprehension by exploiting their differential tuning to low-spatial frequencies (LSFs) and high-spatial frequencies (HSFs). We filtered naturalistic action images to contain only LSF or HSF and measured behavioral performance and corticospinal excitability (CSE) using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Actions were embedded in congruent or incongruent scenarios as defined by the compatibility between grips and intentions afforded by the contextual objects. Behaviorally, participants were better at discriminating congruent actions in intact than LSF images. This effect was reversed for incongruent actions, with better performance for LSF than intact and HSF. These modulations were mirrored at the neurophysiological level, with greater CSE facilitation for congruent than incongruent actions for HSF and the opposite pattern for LSF images. Finally, only for LSF did we observe CSE modulations according to grip kinematics. While results point to differential dorsal (LSF) and ventral (HSF) contributions to action comprehension for grip and context encoding, respectively, the negative congruency effect for LSF images suggests that object processing may influence action perception not only through ventral-to-dorsal connections, but also through a dorsal-to-dorsal route involved in predictive processing.

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“…Indeed, dealing with social interactions in an effective way often requires the ability to anticipate others' behavior, predicting their intentions from observing their movements. Movement kinematic information, however, may be ambiguous in many (if not most) social situations [8,9]. Thus, a social observer needs to integrate this sensory evidence with knowledge of past experiences aiming at the same goal or with contextual cues facilitating action prediction [10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autistic Traits Differently Account for Context-Based Predictions of Physical and Social Events

et al. 2020

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Autism is associated with difficulties in making predictions based on contextual cues. Here, we investigated whether the distribution of autistic traits in the general population, as measured through the Autistic Quotient (AQ), is associated with alterations of context-based predictions of social and non-social stimuli. Seventy-eight healthy participants performed a social task, requiring the prediction of the unfolding of an action as interpersonal (e.g., to give) or individual (e.g., to eat), and a non-social task, requiring the prediction of the appearance of a moving shape as a short (e.g., square) or a long (e.g., rectangle) figure. Both tasks consisted of (i) a familiarization phase, in which the association between each stimulus type and a contextual cue was manipulated with different probabilities of co-occurrence, and (ii) a testing phase, in which visual information was impoverished by early occlusion of video display, thus forcing participants to rely on previously learned context-based associations. Findings showed that the prediction of both social and non-social stimuli was facilitated when embedded in high-probability contexts. However, only the contextual modulation of non-social predictions was reduced in individuals with lower ‘Attention switching’ abilities. The results provide evidence for an association between weaker context-based expectations of non-social events and higher autistic traits.

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Low or High-Level Motor Coding? The Role of Stimulus Complexity

Cited by 28 publications

References 60 publications

Sensorimotor Expectations Bias Motor Resonance during Observation of Object Lifting: The Causal Role of pSTS

Sensorimotor Expectations Bias Motor Resonance during Observation of Object Lifting: The Causal Role of pSTS

Spatial frequency tuning of motor responses reveals differential contribution of dorsal and ventral systems to action comprehension

Autistic Traits Differently Account for Context-Based Predictions of Physical and Social Events

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