Abstract
Recently, cortical areas with motor properties have attracted attention widely to their involvement in both action generation and perception. Inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), ventral premotor cortex (PMv) and inferior parietal lobule (IPL), presumably consisting of motor-related areas, are of particular interest, given that they respond to motor behaviors both when they are performed and observed. Converging neuroimaging evidence has shown the functional roles of IFG, PMv and IPL in action understanding. Most studies have focused on the effects of modulations in goals and kinematics of observed actions on the brain response, but little research has explored the effects of manipulations in motor complexity. To address this, we used fNIRS to examine the brain activity in the frontal, motor, parietal and occipital regions, aiming to better understand the brain correlates involved in encoding motor complexity. Twenty-one healthy adults executed and observed two hand actions that differed in motor complexity. We found that motor complexity sensitive brain regions were present in the pars opercularis IFG/PMv, primary motor cortex (M1), IPL/supramarginal gyrus and middle occipital gyrus (MOG) during action execution, and in pars opercularis IFG/PMv and M1 during action observation. Our findings suggest that the processing of motor complexity involves not only M1 but also pars opercularis IFG, PMv and IPL, each of which plays a critical role in action perception and execution.
Highlights
Cortical areas with motor properties have attracted attention widely to their involvement in both action generation and perception
The HbO time traces with confidence bands within each comparison of two conditions at each regions of interest (ROIs) are depicted in Figs. 4, 5, 6
Our main findings are that (1) motor complexity during execution as represented by the difference between the brain response to simple and complex hand actions, is more strongly represented in ipsilateral pars opercularis inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)/PMv, inferior parietal lobule (IPL)/supramarginal gyrus and middle occipital gyrus (MOG) as well as bilateral M1s, (2) motor complexity during observation is represented primarily in bilateral M1s as well as right pars opercularis IFG/PMv, (3) motor complexity is represented in visual areas during execution but not during observation and (4) hemodynamic response function (HRF) temporal characteristics were different for the observation and execution tasks
Summary
Cortical areas with motor properties have attracted attention widely to their involvement in both action generation and perception. Our findings suggest that the processing of motor complexity involves M1 and pars opercularis IFG, PMv and IPL, each of which plays a critical role in action perception and execution. Motor cognition refers to the functional roles that motor-related cortical areas play in understanding one’s own and others’ actions Those motor-related areas include pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), ventral premotor cortex (PMv) and the rostral part of inferior parietal lobule (IPL). A large number of functional neuroimaging studies have found overlapped activation between action observation and execution in these brain regions[3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] These motor-related areas have been reported to show motor properties, while they are not constrained to motor processing given their engagement in multiple cognitive functions, e.g., language and spatial attention[12,13]. We aimed to investigate the brain correlates of observing and executing the same hand action with differing motor complexity using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS)
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