Ruspantini Irene, D'Ausilio Alessandro, Mäki Hanna, Ilmoniemi Risto J
Cogn Process. 2011 May;12(2):215-8. doi: 10.1007/s10339-011-0391-2. Epub 2011 Jan 30.
Sensorimotor synchronization is a crucial function for human daily activities, which relies on the ability of predicting external events. Synchronization performance, as assessed in finger-tapping (FT) tasks, is characterized by an anticipation tendency, as the tap generally precedes the pacing event. This synchronization error (SE) depends on many factors, in particular on the features of the pacing stimulus. Interest is growing in the facilitation effect that action observation has on motor execution. So far, neuroimaging and neurophysiology studies of motor priming via action observation have mainly employed tasks requiring single action instances. The impact of action observation on motor synchronization to periodic stimuli has not yet been tested; to this aim, a synchronization FT task may be an eligible probing task. The purpose of this study was to characterize a biological pacer at the behavioral level and provide information for those interested in studying the brain processes of continuous observation/execution coupling in timed actions using FT tasks. We evaluated the influence of the biological appearance of a pacer (a tapping finger) on SE, when compared to an abstract, kinematically equivalent pacer (a tilting hinged bar) and a more standard stimulus (a pulsating dot). We showed that the continuous visual display of a biological pacer yields comparable results to the abstract pacer, and a more robust performance and larger anticipations than a traditional pulsating stimulus.
感觉运动同步是人类日常活动的一项关键功能，它依赖于预测外部事件的能力。在手指敲击（FT）任务中评估的同步表现，其特征是具有预期倾向，因为敲击通常先于节拍事件。这种同步误差（SE）取决于许多因素，特别是节拍刺激的特征。动作观察对运动执行的促进作用越来越受到关注。到目前为止，通过动作观察进行运动启动的神经影像学和神经生理学研究主要采用需要单个动作实例的任务。动作观察对与周期性刺激的运动同步的影响尚未得到测试；为此，同步FT任务可能是一个合适的探测任务。本研究的目的是在行为水平上表征一种生物节拍器，并为那些有兴趣使用FT任务研究定时动作中连续观察/执行耦合的大脑过程的人提供信息。与抽象的、运动学上等效的节拍器（一个倾斜的铰接杆）和更标准的刺激（一个脉动点）相比，我们评估了节拍器（一个敲击手指）的生物外观对SE的影响。我们发现，生物节拍器的连续视觉显示产生的结果与抽象节拍器相当，并且比传统的脉动刺激表现更稳健，预期更大。
