Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Réadaptation et Intégration Sociale, Québec City, Québec, Canada.
PLoS One. 2011;6(9):e24728. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0024728. Epub 2011 Sep 12.
The coupling process between observed and performed actions is thought to be performed by a fronto-parietal perception-action system including regions of the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule. When investigating the influence of the movements' characteristics on this process, most research on action observation has focused on only one particular variable even though the type of movements we observe can vary on several levels. By manipulating the visual perspective, transitivity and meaningfulness of observed movements in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study we aimed at investigating how the type of movements and the visual perspective can modulate brain activity during action observation in healthy individuals. Importantly, we used an active observation task where participants had to subsequently execute or imagine the observed movements. Our results show that the fronto-parietal regions of the perception action system were mostly recruited during the observation of meaningless actions while visual perspective had little influence on the activity within the perception-action system. Simultaneous investigation of several sources of modulation during active action observation is probably an approach that could lead to a greater ecological comprehension of this important sensorimotor process.
被观察到的动作和执行的动作之间的耦合过程被认为是通过一个额顶的感知-动作系统来完成的，包括下额前回和下顶叶区域。当研究运动特征对这一过程的影响时，尽管我们观察到的运动类型可以在几个层面上变化，但大多数关于动作观察的研究都只关注一个特定的变量。在一项功能性磁共振成像研究中，通过操纵观察到的运动的视觉透视、传递性和意义，我们旨在研究在健康个体中，运动类型和视觉透视如何调节动作观察过程中的大脑活动。重要的是，我们使用了一个主动观察任务，参与者必须随后执行或想象所观察到的运动。我们的结果表明，感知-动作系统的额顶区域在观察无意义的动作时被大量招募，而视觉透视对感知-动作系统内的活动几乎没有影响。在主动动作观察过程中同时研究几种调制源，可能是一种能够更深入地理解这一重要感觉运动过程的方法。
