Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma, via Volturno 39, 43125 Parma, Italy.
Dipartimento di Scienze biomediche e chirurgico specialistiche, Università di Ferrara, via Fossato di Mortara 64/A 44121, Ferrara, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2017 Mar 14;7:44378. doi: 10.1038/srep44378.
Prefrontal cortex is crucial for exploiting contextual information for the planning and guidance of behavioral responses. Among contextual cues, those provided by others' behavior are particularly important, in primates, for selecting appropriate reactions and suppressing the inappropriate ones. These latter functions deeply rely on the ability to understand others' actions. However, it is largely unknown whether prefrontal neurons are activated by action observation. To address this issue, we recorded the activity of ventrolateral prefrontal (VLPF) neurons of macaque monkeys during the observation of videos depicting biological movements performed by a monkey or a human agent, and object motion. Our results show that a population of VLPF neurons respond to the observation of biological movements, in particular those representing goal directed actions. Many of these neurons also show a preference for the agent performing the action. The neural response is present also when part of the observed movement is obscured, suggesting that these VLPF neurons code a high order representation of the observed action rather than a simple visual description of it.
前额皮质对于利用上下文信息来规划和指导行为反应至关重要。在各种上下文线索中，他人行为提供的线索在灵长类动物中尤为重要，因为这些线索有助于选择适当的反应并抑制不适当的反应。这些后者的功能深深依赖于理解他人行为的能力。然而，前额皮质神经元是否会因观察动作而被激活，这在很大程度上仍是未知的。为了解决这个问题，我们在猕猴观察描述猴子或人类代理执行的生物运动以及物体运动的视频时，记录了腹外侧前额皮质（VLPF）神经元的活动。我们的结果表明，一群 VLPF 神经元对生物运动的观察做出反应，特别是那些代表目标导向动作的运动。这些神经元中的许多也对执行动作的代理表现出偏好。即使观察到的运动的一部分被遮挡，这种神经反应仍然存在，这表明这些 VLPF 神经元编码的是观察到的动作的高级表示，而不是对其的简单视觉描述。
