Abstract
Humans observe a wide range of actions in their surroundings. How is the visual cortex organized to process this diverse input? Using functional neuroimaging, we measured brain responses while participants viewed short videos of everyday actions, then probed the structure in these responses using voxel-wise encoding modeling. Responses are well fit by feature spaces that capture the body parts involved in an action and the action’s targets (i.e. whether the action was directed at an object, another person, the actor, and space). Clustering analyses reveal five large-scale networks that summarize the voxel tuning: one related to social aspects of an action, and four related to the scale of the interaction envelope, ranging from fine-scale manipulations directed at objects, to large-scale whole-body movements directed at distant locations. We propose that these networks reveal the major representational joints in how actions are processed by visual regions of the brain.
Highlights
Humans observe a wide range of actions in their surroundings
We find that the effectors used to perform an action and what an action is targeted at successfully predict responses to action videos in much of the occipito-temporal and parietal cortices
We found that Gist features predicted brain responses well in early visual cortex, while the body part and target features provided better fits across occipitotemporal and parietal cortex (Fig. 5)
Summary
Humans observe a wide range of actions in their surroundings. How is the visual cortex organized to process this diverse input? Using functional neuroimaging, we measured brain responses while participants viewed short videos of everyday actions, probed the structure in these responses using voxel-wise encoding modeling. Clustering analyses reveal five large-scale networks that summarize the voxel tuning: one related to social aspects of an action, and four related to the scale of the interaction envelope, ranging from fine-scale manipulations directed at objects, to large-scale whole-body movements directed at distant locations We propose that these networks reveal the major representational joints in how actions are processed by visual regions of the brain. Others have argued that an action’s sociality (whether or not an action is directed at a person) and transitivity (whether or not it is directed at an object) organize action processing in the lateral temporal cortex[3,9] Drawing from this prior work, here we examined patterns of tuning to the different body parts that are involved in performing an action and what the action is directed at (its target; e.g., an object, another person, et cetera)
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