Movement kinematics drive chain selection toward intention detection

Soriano, Marco; Cavallo, Andrea; D’Ausilio, Alessandro; Becchio, Cristina; Fadiga, Luciano

doi:10.1073/pnas.1809825115

Cited by 31 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Nevertheless, we decided to collapse the four probability conditions during familiarization owing to their unequal number of trials resultant from the probabilistic manipulation. An independent t-test comparing the overall d 0 scores obtained during the familiarization revealed no differences (t 46 . Furthermore, non-significant differences were observed for the c values (t 46 = −1.683, p = 0.099), suggesting that predictive performance in both groups was comparable when the amount of visual kinematics information was high and that their responses were not biased in terms of identifying individual or interpersonal actions.…”

Section: Results (A) Neuropsychological Resultsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Contextual priors do not modulate action prediction in children with autism

et al. 2019

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Bayesian accounts of autism suggest that this disorder may be rooted in an impaired ability to estimate the probability of future events, possibly owing to reduced priors. Here, we tested this hypothesis within the action domain in children with and without autism using a behavioural paradigm comprising a familiarization and a testing phase. During familiarization, children observed videos depicting a child model performing actions in diverse contexts. Crucially, within this phase, we implicitly biased action-context associations in terms of their probability of co-occurrence. During testing, children observed the same videos but drastically shortened (i.e. reduced amount of kinematics information) and were asked to infer action unfolding. Since during the testing phase movement kinematics became ambiguous, we expected children's responses to be biased to contextual priors, thus compensating for perceptual uncertainty. While this probabilistic effect was present in controls, no such modulation was observed in autistic children, overall suggesting an impairment in using contextual priors when predicting other peoples' actions in uncertain environments.

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Section: Results (A) Neuropsychological Resultsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Contextual priors do not modulate action prediction in children with autism

et al. 2019

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“…A further criticism may be that the task design produced the observed differences between PT and ST. For example, the PT implies a degree of uncertainty in grip selection at the beginning of each trial, whereas this is not the case in the ST, where the monkey is always required to use a precision grip. Although it is known that the final goal of an action exerts an early influence on both neural 5,6 and kinematic 38,39 signature of intentional motor sequences, such as grasp-to-eat or grasp-to-place, in this latter case the major difference between the trials becomes more relevant when the object has been grasped and the task diverges. Future studies may directly explore this issue by testing the possible interaction between semantic and pragmatic affordance coding in single trials, randomizing within a unique factorial design the visual presentation of objects with various combinations of pragmatic (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential neural dynamics underlying pragmatic and semantic affordance processing in macaque ventral premotor cortex

Maranesi

Bruni

Livi

et al. 2019

Sci Rep

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Premotor neurons play a fundamental role in transforming physical properties of observed objects, such as size and shape, into motor plans for grasping them, hence contributing to “pragmatic” affordance processing. Premotor neurons can also contribute to “semantic” affordance processing, as they can discharge differently even to pragmatically identical objects depending on their behavioural relevance for the observer (i.e. edible or inedible objects). Here, we compared the response of monkey ventral premotor area F5 neurons tested during pragmatic (PT) or semantic (ST) visuomotor tasks. Object presentation responses in ST showed shorter latency and lower object selectivity than in PT. Furthermore, we found a difference between a transient representation of semantic affordances and a sustained representation of pragmatic affordances at both the single neuron and population level. Indeed, responses in ST returned to baseline within 0.5 s whereas in PT they showed the typical sustained visual-to-motor activity during Go trials. In contrast, during No-go trials, the time course of pragmatic and semantic information processing was similar. These findings suggest that premotor cortex generates different dynamics depending on pragmatic and semantic information provided by the context in which the to-be-grasped object is presented.

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“…1,3 However, in neuroscience, cortical and hippocampal neurons in dissociated culture generate a non-physiological activity characterized by globally synchronized burst firing, often referred to as 'network bursts'. [4][5][6][7] This activity pattern is significantly different from that observed in an animals' cortex or hippocampus, which is highly complex both spatially and temporally. 8,9 Such complexity in neural activity is important, as it underlies the computational capacity of the neuronal networks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…12 The role of external inputs in shaping the spontaneous dynamics of the cultured neural networks has also been investigated both experimentally and computationally, showing that chronic application of external stimulus that resembles thalamic input decorrelates cortical neuronal network activity. [13][14][15] Furthermore, pharmacological blockade of an AMPA-type glutamate receptor with CNQX at a dose below its IC50 reduces the spatial extent of the burst spreading, 5 possibly through a reduction in the excitatory synaptic strength that is excessively strong in cultured neurons as compared to the in vivo cortex. 16-18 4 Another major difference between the in vitro and in vivo neuronal networks is the mechanical property of their scaffolds.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Suppression of hypersynchronous network activity in cultured cortical neurons using an ultrasoft silicone scaffold

2020

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The spontaneous activity pattern of cortical neurons in dissociated culture is characterized by burst firing that is highly synchronized among a wide population of cells. The degree of synchrony, however, is excessively higher than that in cortical tissues. Here, we employed polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomers to establish a novel system for culturing neurons on a scaffold with an elastic modulus resembling brain tissue, and investigated the effect of the scaffold's elasticity on network activity patterns in cultured rat cortical neurons. Using whole-cell patch clamp to assess the scaffold effect on the development of synaptic connections, we found that the amplitude of excitatory postsynaptic current, as well as the frequency of spontaneous transmissions, was reduced in neuronal networks grown on an ultrasoft PDMS with an elastic modulus of 0.5 kPa. Furthermore, the ultrasoft scaffold was found to suppress neural correlations in the spontaneous activity of the cultured neuronal network. The dose of GsMTx-4, an antagonist of stretch-activated cation channels (SACs), required to reduce the generation of the events below 1.0 event/min on PDMS substrates was lower than that for neurons on a glass substrate. This suggests that the difference in the baseline level of SAC activation is a molecular mechanism underlying the alteration in neuronal network activity depending on scaffold stiffness. Our results demonstrate the potential application of PDMS with biomimetic elasticity as cell-culture scaffold for bridging the in vivo-in vitro gap in neuronal systems.

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Movement kinematics drive chain selection toward intention detection

Cited by 31 publications

References 37 publications

Contextual priors do not modulate action prediction in children with autism

Contextual priors do not modulate action prediction in children with autism

Differential neural dynamics underlying pragmatic and semantic affordance processing in macaque ventral premotor cortex

Suppression of hypersynchronous network activity in cultured cortical neurons using an ultrasoft silicone scaffold

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