Abstract
Previous research indicates that mirror neuron system (MNS), comprising posterior parietal (PPC) and ventral premotor (PMv) cortices, has a role in action understanding. However, action selectivity within these regions has not been elucidated. We investigated whether the MNS contains information about observed actions. Participants observed object-directed hand actions. We independently manipulated five dimensions of observed images: action (grasp/touch), object (cup/bottle), perspective (egocentric/allocentric), hand (right/left), and image size (large/small), and investigated whether this information could be decoded from multi-voxel pattern activity. The early visual area showed significant above-chance classification accuracy consistent with dissimilarity of input images. In contrast, significant decoding accuracy was observed for action, object, and mirror-image of hand in the PPC and for action and object in the PMv. Our study indicates that the MNS processes observed actions in a hierarchical manner, where the PPC represents action together with hand, and the PMv encodes more abstracted representations of transitive action.
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Ogawa, K., Inui, T. (2011). Decoding Action Selectivity of Observed Images Using fMRI Pattern Analysis. In: Wang, R., Gu, F. (eds) Advances in Cognitive Neurodynamics (II). Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9695-1_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9695-1_20
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