Neuroanatomical correlates of biological motion detection

Sharon Gilaie-Dotan,Ryota Kanai,Bahador Bahrami,Geraint Rees,Ayse P Saygin

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.11.027

Abstract

Biological motion detection is both commonplace and important, but there is great inter-individual variability in this ability, the neural basis of which is currently unknown. Here we examined whether the behavioral variability in biological motion detection is reflected in brain anatomy. Perceptual thresholds for detection of biological motion and control conditions (non-biological object motion detection and motion coherence) were determined in a group of healthy human adults (n=31) together with structural magnetic resonance images of the brain. Voxel based morphometry analyzes revealed that gray matter volumes of left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and left ventral premotor cortex (vPMC) significantly predicted individual differences in biological motion detection, but showed no significant relationship with performance on the control tasks. Our study reveals a neural basis associated with the inter-individual variability in biological motion detection, reliably linking the neuroanatomical structure of left pSTS and vPMC with biological motion detection performance.

Highlights

Perceiving and understanding biological motion – the movements of animate entities – is important for many tasks of biological significance, from hunting prey and avoiding predators, to imitation, social cognition, and theory of mind (Blake & Shiffrar, 2007)
We found that the grey matter volume of two clusters, one in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus and one in the left inferior precentral sulcus in ventral premotor cortex, was significantly correlated (P(corr.)o0.05) with biological motion detection ability (Bio-Det, main experiment), as shown in Fig. 2
To examine whether the relationship we found between gray matter density and behavioral measures was specific to biological motion detection ability, we extracted the grey matter volume of these clusters within posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) or ventral premotor cortex (vPMC) that were correlated with biological motion ability, and regressed them onto independent behavioral data from Experiments 2 and 3 reflecting non-biological motion detection and motion coherence thresholds

Summary

Introduction

Perceiving and understanding biological motion – the movements of animate entities – is important for many tasks of biological significance, from hunting prey and avoiding predators, to imitation, social cognition, and theory of mind (Blake & Shiffrar, 2007). Key to these is detecting biological motion in the environment. We investigated the neural correlates of this interindividual variability in biological motion detection by examining whether the neural structure of brain areas that support biological motion processing was associated with biological motion detection ability.

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