Di Cesare Giuseppe, Valente Giancarlo, Di Dio Cinzia, Ruffaldi Emanuele, Bergamasco Massimo, Goebel Rainer, Rizzolatti Giacomo
Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma Parma, Italy.
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University Maastricht, Netherlands.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2016 Jun 9;10:267. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00267. eCollection 2016.
Observing the style of an action done by others allows the observer to understand the cognitive state of the agent. This information has been defined by Stern "vitality forms". Previous experiments showed that the dorso-central insula is selectively active both during vitality form observation and execution. In the present study, we presented participants with videos showing hand actions performed with different velocities and asked them to judge either their vitality form (gentle, neutral, rude) or their velocity (slow, medium, fast). The aim of the present study was to assess, using multi-voxel pattern analysis, whether vitality forms and velocities of observed goal-directed actions are differentially processed in the insula, and more specifically whether action velocity is encoded per se or it is an element that triggers neural populations of the insula encoding the vitality form. The results showed that, consistently across subjects, in the dorso-central sector of the insula there were voxels selectively tuned to vitality forms, while voxel tuned to velocity were rare. These results indicate that the dorso-central insula, which previous data showed to be involved in the vitality form processing, contains voxels specific for the action style processing.
观察他人的行为方式能让观察者了解行为主体的认知状态。这种信息已被斯特恩定义为“活力形式”。先前的实验表明，在观察和执行活力形式时，背侧中央脑岛会选择性地活跃。在本研究中，我们向参与者展示了以不同速度执行手部动作的视频，并要求他们判断动作的活力形式（轻柔、中性、粗鲁）或速度（慢、中、快）。本研究的目的是使用多体素模式分析来评估，在脑岛中观察到的目标导向动作的活力形式和速度是否被差异处理，更具体地说，动作速度是本身被编码，还是它是触发脑岛中编码活力形式的神经群体的一个要素。结果表明，在所有受试者中，脑岛背侧中央区域存在选择性地调谐到活力形式的体素，而调谐到速度的体素很少。这些结果表明，先前数据显示参与活力形式处理的背侧中央脑岛包含特定于动作风格处理的体素。
