Abstract
When your favourite athlete flops over the high-jump bar, you may twist your body in front of the TV screen. Such automatic motor facilitation, ‘mirroring’ or even overt imitation is not always appropriate. Here, we show, by monitoring motor-cortex brain rhythms with magnetoencephalography (MEG) in healthy adults, that viewing intermittent hand actions of another person, in addition to activation, phasically stabilizes the viewer's primary motor cortex, with the maximum of half a second after the onset of the seen movement. Such a stabilization was evident as enhanced cortex–muscle coherence at 16–20 Hz, despite signs of almost simultaneous suppression of rolandic rhythms of approximately 7 and 15 Hz as a sign of activation of the sensorimotor cortex. These findings suggest that inhibition suppresses motor output during viewing another person's actions, thereby withholding unintentional imitation.
Highlights
Viewing another person may trigger an unconscious urge to imitate their actions or postures
Executed and observed movements are commonly considered to be associated with activations in overlapping motor brain areas that form nodes of ‘mirroring systems’, and one may wonder how it is possible to prevent imitation of every seen action
By comparing cortex–muscle coherence (CMC) modulation with the changes in mu-rhythm power, we found evidence for a dual effect in the primary motor cortex: one neuronal population involved in the stabilization and another in the activation of the M1 cortex in overlapping time windows within the 1 s interval following the onset of the observed movement
Summary
Viewing another person may trigger an unconscious urge to imitate their actions or postures. These recordings indicate that the subjects were able to maintain the steady isometric contraction with no statistically significant modulation in relation to the experimenter’s movements ( p 1⁄4 0.28 for force and p 1⁄4 0.19 for EMG).
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Schedule a callMore From: Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
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