Abstract
Prefrontal cortex is crucial for exploiting contextual information for the planning and guidance of behavioral responses. Among contextual cues, those provided by others’ behavior are particularly important, in primates, for selecting appropriate reactions and suppressing the inappropriate ones. These latter functions deeply rely on the ability to understand others’ actions. However, it is largely unknown whether prefrontal neurons are activated by action observation. To address this issue, we recorded the activity of ventrolateral prefrontal (VLPF) neurons of macaque monkeys during the observation of videos depicting biological movements performed by a monkey or a human agent, and object motion. Our results show that a population of VLPF neurons respond to the observation of biological movements, in particular those representing goal directed actions. Many of these neurons also show a preference for the agent performing the action. The neural response is present also when part of the observed movement is obscured, suggesting that these VLPF neurons code a high order representation of the observed action rather than a simple visual description of it.
Highlights
In order to evaluate the response of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPF) neurons to the observation of biological movements and object motion, we devised a task in which monkeys were required to keep their hand on a resting position and to observe different videos presented on a video monitor
The videos employed (Fig. 1b) depicted a monkey grasping a piece of food seen from a first (Monkey Grasping I, Monkey grasping in first person perspective (MGI)) or third (Monkey Grasping III, Monkey grasping in third person perspective (MGIII)) person perspective, a human actor, seen from a lateral view, grasping an object (Human Grasping, Human grasping (HG)), mimicking this action (Human Mimicking, Human mimicking (HM)) or extending his forelimb in front of himself (Biological movement, BM), and the motion of an object (Object Motion, Object motion (OM))
We recorded the activity of 584 VLPF task-related neurons, that is, those showing a significant modulation of their discharge during at least one of the epochs (Video epoch I and/ or II) of at least one of the tested videos relative to baseline (3 × 6 ANOVA for repeated measures, p < 0.01, see Materials and Methods)
Summary
In order to evaluate the response of VLPF neurons to the observation of biological movements and object motion, we devised a task in which monkeys were required to keep their hand (contralateral to the recorded hemisphere) on a resting position and to observe different videos presented on a video monitor (see Materials and Methods). Based on their responses in the basic observation task, 21 neurons were tested with the videos showing monkey actions (either MGI, MGIII or both), 14 with those depicting human grasping and mimicking (either HG, HM or both), and one with both types of videos.
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