Abstract
Errors while performing an action are fundamental for learning. During interaction others’ errors must be monitored and taken into account to allow joint action coordination and imitation learning. This monitoring relies on an action observation network (AON) mainly based on parietofrontal recurrent circuits. Although different studies suggest that inappropriate actions may rapidly be inhibited during execution, little is known about the modulation of the AON when an action misstep is shown. Here we used single and paired pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to assess corticospinal excitability, intracortical facilitation and intracortical inhibition at different time intervals (120, 180, 240 ms) after the visual presentation of a motor execution error. Results show a specific and early (120 ms) decrease of intracortical inhibition likely because of a significant mismatch between the observed erroneous action and observer’s expectations. Indeed, as proposed by the top-down predictive framework, the motor system may be involved in the generation of these error signals and our data show that this mechanism could rely on the early decrease of intracortical inhibition within the corticomotor system.
Highlights
In everyday life, while interacting with others, we continuously infer their intentions[1] through a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing sensitive to action goals[2,3,4]
It is worth noting that 120 ms is the earliest latency at which corticospinal excitability is modulated by graspable object observation[38]
Motor Evoked Potentials (MEP) (Motor evoked potentials) evoked by spTMS provide an instantaneous read-out of the state of the motor system and had been widely used to investigate modulations related to action observation[32,39,40]
Summary
While interacting with others, we continuously infer their intentions[1] through a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing sensitive to action goals[2,3,4]. These activations could reflect a matching process between observed actions onto corresponding stored motor representations[11] In this regard, some studies proposed that social action error detection may rely on our capability in sensing subtle kinematic violations in the observed action[12,13,14]. SICI and ICF have rarely been used to investigate AON activity[41,42,43], in particular during erroneous actions observation They differ from the spTMS because they reflect the behavior of distinct populations of inhibitory and excitatory cortical interneurons without affecting spinal circuits[44]. The second one suggests instead that action observation involves the minimization of the sensory prediction error (i.e., Bayesian-like inferences are generated and dynamically compared to the incoming sensory information) These prediction errors propagate through recurrent interactions among the different levels of the cortical hierarchy involved in action perception. The relative balance between local cortical inhibition and facilitation can in principle disentangle which one of the two views is the most effective in explaining how action missteps are incorporated in the representation of other’s action
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