Measurement of brain activity related to behavior acquisition by imitation learning using near-infrared spectroscopy

Abstract

According to David Marr, three levels are needed to understand information processing systems. Those are “computational theory”, “representation” and “algorithm and hardware implementation”. This idea improves understanding brain function and technological application in a mutually complementary manner. On the other hand, the development of measuring brain function enabled us to apply brain activities to engineering. Measuring brain activity have been used for the evaluation method to information that is difficult to quantify such as emotion and learning levels. This work investigates the relationships between learning levels and brain activities. In the conducted experiment, subjects firstly learned a set of procedures for assembling work by observation and then imitated the procedures in the tasks. After several practices, they participated in the same tasks. The results indicates that activities of regions of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) have increased at pre-learning and a wide region of prefrontal area have increased at post-learning during the observation. In the imitation, regions of DLPFC were activated at pre-learning. At the post-learning, the regions of DLPFC, frontopolar cortex and inferior prefrontal gyrus were activated. These findings are accorded with the results of the previous studies and suggest the necessity of considering the effects of a default mode network on the brain activities of imitation learning.