Abstract
The extent to which perception and action share common neural processes is much debated in cognitive neuroscience. Taking a developmental approach to this issue allows us to assess whether perceptual processing develops in close association with the emergence of related action skills within the same individual. The current study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate the perception of human action in 4- to 6-month-old human infants. In addition, the infants' manual dexterity was assessed using the fine motor component of The Mullen Scales of Early Learning and an in-house developed Manual Dexterity task. Results show that the degree of cortical activation, within the posterior superior temporal sulcus—temporoparietal junction (pSTS-TPJ) region, to the perception of manual actions in individual infants correlates with their own level of fine motor skills. This association was not fully explained by either measures of global attention (i.e., looking time) or general developmental stage. This striking concordance between the emergence of motor skills and related perceptual processing within individuals is consistent with experience-related cortical specialization in the developing brain.
Highlights
Our hands are a gateway to both our physical and our social world
As behavioral studies have shown that fine motor experience in infants is associated with an ability to interpret perceived actions in others (Sommerville et al 2005; Falck-Ytter et al 2006; Gredebäck and Melinder 2010; Daum et al 2011), we aimed to investigate whether in those infants with better fine motor skills, the pSTS-temporoparietal junction (TPJ) region may be activated to a greater degree when viewing others perform manual actions
We investigated the neural processing resulting from viewing manual actions and the association with developing fine motor skills in human infants
Summary
Our hands are a gateway to both our physical and our social world. Do we use our hands to touch and explore our surroundings, we use them to gesture and convey social information. Understanding one’s own and other’s actions may be intrinsically linked. Prinz (1997) provided a theoretical framework for the understanding of this functional relationship suggesting that a common representational domain exists between the perception of an action and the production of the same action—a hypothesis that has been supported by a number of studies (Brass et al 2001; Hamilton et al 2004). Despite the extensive study of perception-action relations in the brain, a number of critical questions remain. Given that perception and action both develop during infancy, the aim of this study was to measure brain activation resulting from the perception of actions during a period when infants are in rapid transition in terms of motor development
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