Social Brain, Body & Action Lab, Department of Psychology & Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5, Canada.
BMC Neurosci. 2013 Dec 14;14:155. doi: 10.1186/1471-2202-14-155.
Motor activity during vicarious experience of actions is a widely reported and studied phenomenon, and motor system activity also accompanies observation of graspable objects in the absence of any actions. Such motor activity is thought to reflect simulation of the observed action, or preparation to interact with the object, respectively.
Here, in an initial exploratory study, we ask whether motor activity during observation of object directed actions is involved in processes related to recognition of the object after initial exposure. Single pulse Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) was applied over the thumb representation of the motor cortex, or over the vertex, during observation of a model thumb typing on a cell-phone, and performance on a phone recognition task at the end of the trial was assessed. Disrupting motor processing over the thumb representation 100 ms after the onset of the typing video impaired the ability to recognize the phone in the recognition test, whereas there was no such effect for TMS applied over the vertex and no TMS trials. Furthermore, this effect only manifested for videos observed from the first person perspective. In an additional control condition, there was no evidence for any effects of TMS to the thumb representation or vertex when observing and recognizing non-action related shape stimuli.
Overall, these data provide evidence that motor cortical processing during observation of object-directed actions from a first person perspective is causally linked to the formation of enduring representations of objects-of-action.
在替代性体验动作的过程中产生运动活动是一个被广泛报道和研究的现象，在没有任何动作的情况下，观察可抓取的物体时也会产生运动系统活动。这种运动活动被认为分别反映了对观察到的动作的模拟或准备与物体进行交互。
在这项初步探索性研究中，我们询问在观察指向物体的动作时的运动活动是否参与了在最初暴露后识别物体的相关过程。在观察模型用拇指在手机上打字时，在运动皮层拇指代表区或头顶给予单个脉冲经颅磁刺激（TMS），并在试验结束时评估手机识别任务的表现。在打字视频开始后 100 毫秒时，在拇指代表区给予 TMS 会损害在识别测试中识别手机的能力，而在头顶给予 TMS 或没有 TMS 试验则没有这种影响。此外，这种影响仅在从第一人称视角观察视频时出现。在附加的对照条件下，当观察和识别与动作无关的形状刺激时，在拇指代表区或头顶给予 TMS 没有任何证据表明有任何影响。
总的来说，这些数据提供了证据表明，在第一人称视角观察指向物体的动作时，运动皮层的处理与动作对象的持久表征的形成有关。
