Abstract
Several neurophysiologic and neuroimaging studies suggested that motor and perceptual systems are tightly linked along a continuum rather than providing segregated mechanisms supporting different functions. Using correlational approaches, these studies demonstrated that action observation activates not only visual but also motor brain regions. On the other hand, brain stimulation and brain lesion evidence allows tackling the critical question of whether our action representations are necessary to perceive and understand others’ actions. In particular, recent neuropsychological studies have shown that patients with temporal, parietal, and frontal lesions exhibit a number of possible deficits in the visual perception and the understanding of others’ actions. The specific anatomical substrates of such neuropsychological deficits however, are still a matter of debate. Here we review the existing literature on this issue and perform an anatomic likelihood estimation meta-analysis of studies using lesion-symptom mapping methods on the causal relation between brain lesions and non-linguistic action perception and understanding deficits. The meta-analysis encompassed data from 361 patients tested in 11 studies and identified regions in the inferior frontal cortex, the inferior parietal cortex and the middle/superior temporal cortex, whose damage is consistently associated with poor performance in action perception and understanding tasks across studies. Interestingly, these areas correspond to the three nodes of the action observation network that are strongly activated in response to visual action perception in neuroimaging research and that have been targeted in previous brain stimulation studies. Thus, brain lesion mapping research provides converging causal evidence that premotor, parietal and temporal regions play a crucial role in action recognition and understanding.
Highlights
Ever since the revolutionary proposal that action and perception systems are tightly linked along a continuum rather than being segregated mechanisms supporting different functions, behavioral studies have shown the many ways in which activity in the motor system modulates concurrent or delayed action perception and the other way around (Prinz, 1997; Schütz-Bosbach and Prinz, 2007a)
The resulting list of 36 papers was screened for the following exclusion criteria: (1) not mapping and analyzing patients lesions using one of the standard lesion-symptom mapping approaches based on voxel-lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM), subtraction of lesion overlaps, or voxelbased morphometry (VBM); (2) administering tasks with strong linguistic processing demand and (3) cases in which the coordinates of the clusters in the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI; Evans et al, 1993) or Talairach space (Talairach and Tournoux, 1988) could not be identified either from the information provided in the paper or directly from the authors
The cluster with greatest convergence was the one in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (AnLE value = 0.017), especially in the pars opercularis, while the other two clusters were less reliably identified in the studies considered here (AnLE value < 0.12)
Summary
Ever since the revolutionary proposal that action and perception systems are tightly linked along a continuum rather than being segregated mechanisms supporting different functions, behavioral studies have shown the many ways in which activity in the motor system modulates concurrent or delayed action perception and the other way around (Prinz, 1997; Schütz-Bosbach and Prinz, 2007a). In line with the old ideomotor principle, current models of action perception suggest that in order to solve this computational challenge the brain has evolved an efficient sensorimotor mechanism, namely mapping visual representations of the observed actions onto corresponding motor representations The activation of motor schemata while observing similar motor schemata in others may allow an understanding of others’ actions “from inside” (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, 2010) and this motor coding of observed actions may be used to predict incoming visual signals and refine visual perception
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