Abstract
Communication is an important aspect of human life, allowing us to powerfully coordinate our behaviour with that of others. Boiled down to its mere essentials, communication entails transferring a mental content from one brain to another. Spoken language obviously plays an important role in communication between human individuals. Manual gestures however often aid the semantic interpretation of the spoken message, and gestures may have played a central role in the earlier evolution of communication. Here we used the social game of charades to investigate the neural basis of gestural communication by having participants produce and interpret meaningful gestures while their brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging. While participants decoded observed gestures, the putative mirror neuron system (pMNS: premotor, parietal and posterior mid-temporal cortex), associated with motor simulation, and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), associated with mentalizing and agency attribution, were significantly recruited. Of these areas only the pMNS was recruited during the production of gestures. This suggests that gestural communication relies on a combination of simulation and, during decoding, mentalizing/agency attribution brain areas. Comparing the decoding of gestures with a condition in which participants viewed the same gestures with an instruction not to interpret the gestures showed that although parts of the pMNS responded more strongly during active decoding, most of the pMNS and the TPJ did not show such significant task effects. This suggests that the mere observation of gestures recruits most of the system involved in voluntary interpretation.
Highlights
Communication is an important aspect of human life, allowing us to powerfully coordinate our behaviour with that of others
The main goals of the study were to investigate to what extent (a) the putative mirror neuron system (pMNS) for transitive hand actions and (b) pToM areas are involved in deliberate communication through gestures, and (c) how dependent the activity in these areas is on the communicative intention induced by the task
This suggests that observing gestures recruits a combination of temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and pMNS both when participants actively decode gestures and when they passively watch them
Summary
Communication is an important aspect of human life, allowing us to powerfully coordinate our behaviour with that of others. Spoken language obviously plays an important role in communication between human individuals. Manual gestures often aid the semantic interpretation of the spoken message [1,2,3,4,5], and gestures may have played a central role in the earlier evolution of communication [6,7,8]. We will examine here the neural substrates of gestural communication in humans. This question has received less attention in the field of neuroscience than spoken language, two potentially complementary processes have been implicated in the perception and/or production of gestures: simulation and mentalizing [9,10,11]
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