Abstract
Brain activity relating to recognition of action varies among subjects. These differences have been hypothesised to originate from genetic and environmental factors although the extent of their effect remains unclear. Effects of these factors on brain activity during action recognition were evaluated by comparing magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals in twins. MEG signals of 20 pairs of elderly monozygotic twins and 11 pairs of elderly dizygotic twins were recorded while they observed finger movements and copied them. Beamformer and group statistical analyses were performed to evaluate spatiotemporal differences in cortical activities. Significant event-related desynchronisation (ERD) of the β band (13–25 Hz) at the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) was observed for both action observation and execution. Moreover, β-band ERD at the left IPL during action observation was significantly better correlated among monozygotic twins compared to unrelated pairs (Z-test, p = 0.027). β-band ERD heritability at the left IPL was 67% in an ACE model. These results demonstrate that β-band ERD at the IPL, which is commonly observed during action recognition and execution, is affected by genetic rather than environmental factors. The effect of genetic factors on the cortical activity of action recognition may depend on anatomical location and frequency characteristics.
Highlights
Recognizing action is crucial for humans[1,2,3]
Twenty monozygotic twins and 11 dizygotic twins were enrolled in this study after obtaining written informed consent in accordance with the protocols approved by the ethics committee of the Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine
We identified significant event-related synchronisation (ERS) and event-related desynchronisation (ERD) in each frequency band at various locations during action observation and execution
Summary
Recognizing action is crucial for humans[1,2,3]. Humans imitate the actions of others and can understand the intentions of others by cognitively processing observations of action[4,5,6]. How genetic and environmental factors influence brain activity during action observation remains unclear. MEG studies involving twins demonstrated that genetic factors have a large effect on MEG responses during somatosensory[18] and motor tasks[19]. We have recently shown that genetic factors largely explain the alteration of frequency-specific cortical activity during word recognition[23] Both for action recognition and action execution, β-band ERD was mainly enhanced in the sensorimotor and parietal areas[24,25,26]. We quantified the effect of genetic and environmental factors on cortical activity related to action observation by comparing MEG responses of elderly monozygotic and dizygotic twins during the observation of hand movements
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