Elsner Birgit, Hommel Bernhard, Mentschel Claudia, Drzezga Alexander, Prinz Wolfgang, Conrad Bastian, Siebner Hartwig
Department of Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, D-80799, Munich, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2002 Sep;17(1):364-72. doi: 10.1006/nimg.2002.1162.
Voluntary action is goal-directed and therefore depends on the ability to learn associations between movements and their perceivable consequences. The neural substrate of this ability was investigated with H2(15O) positron emission tomography (PET). Healthy adults first learned that self-initiated keypresses were consistently followed by certain tones (i.e., action effects). During PET imaging, participants listened to varied ratios of action-effect tones and neutral tones without performing any movement. The caudal supplementary motor area and the right hippocampus increased their activity with the frequency of action-effect tones, suggesting that both cortical areas play a role in linking the consequences of an action and the action itself. This integration process represents a highly flexible mechanism that helps to promote the learning, automatization, and control of voluntary
