Social Brain in Action Laboratory, Wales Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, UK.
Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, Faculty of Brain Sciences, University College London, London, UK.
Neural Plast. 2018 Jul 12;2018:5459106. doi: 10.1155/2018/5459106. eCollection 2018.
How we perceive others in action is shaped by our prior experience. Many factors influence brain responses when observing others in action, including training in a particular physical skill, such as sport or dance, and also general development and aging processes. Here, we investigate how learning a complex motor skill shapes neural and behavioural responses among a dance-naïve sample of 20 young and 19 older adults. Across four days, participants physically rehearsed one set of dance sequences, observed a second set, and a third set remained untrained. Functional MRI was obtained prior to and immediately following training. Participants' behavioural performance on motor and visual tasks improved across the training period, with younger adults showing steeper performance gains than older adults. At the brain level, both age groups demonstrated decreased sensorimotor cortical engagement after physical training, with younger adults showing more pronounced decreases in inferior parietal activity compared to older adults. Neural decoding results demonstrate that among both age groups, visual and motor regions contain experience-specific representations of new motor learning. By combining behavioural measures of performance with univariate and multivariate measures of brain activity, we can start to build a more complete picture of age-related changes in experience-dependent plasticity.
我们对他人行为的感知受到先前经验的影响。许多因素会影响我们观察他人行为时的大脑反应，包括在特定身体技能（如运动或舞蹈）方面的训练，以及一般的发展和衰老过程。在这里，我们研究了学习复杂运动技能如何塑造舞蹈新手样本中 20 名年轻和 19 名年长成年人的神经和行为反应。在四天的时间里，参与者实际排练了一组舞蹈序列，观察了第二组，第三组则保持未训练状态。在训练前后进行了功能磁共振成像。参与者在运动和视觉任务上的行为表现随着训练期的进行而提高，年轻成年人的表现提高幅度大于年长成年人。在大脑水平上，两个年龄组在身体训练后都表现出感觉运动皮层参与减少，与年长成年人相比，年轻成年人的下顶叶活动减少更为明显。神经解码结果表明，在两个年龄组中，视觉和运动区域都包含新运动学习的经验特异性表示。通过将表现的行为测量与大脑活动的单变量和多变量测量相结合，我们可以开始构建更完整的经验依赖性可塑性与年龄相关变化的图片。
