Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 17177, Stockholm, Sweden.
Cereb Cortex. 2020 Sep 3;30(10):5193-5203. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhaa018.
Understanding how perception and action are coupled in the brain has important implications for training, rehabilitation, and brain-machine interfaces. Ideomotor theory postulates that willed actions are represented through previously experienced effects and initiated by the anticipation of those effects. Previous research has accordingly found that sensory events, if previously associated with action outcomes, can induce activity in motor regions. However, it remains unclear whether the motor-related activity induced during perception of more naturalistic sequences of actions actually represents "sequence-specific" information. In the present study, nonmusicians were firstly trained to play two melodies on the piano; secondly, they performed an fMRI experiment while listening to these melodies as well as novel, untrained melodies; thirdly, multivariate pattern analysis was used to test if voxel-wise patterns of brain activity could identify trained, but not novel melodies. The results importantly show that after associative learning, a series of sensory events can trigger sequence-specific representations in both sensory and motor networks. Interestingly, also novel melodies could be classified in multiple regions, including default mode regions. A control experiment confirmed these outcomes to be training-dependent. We discuss how action-perception coupling may enable spontaneous near transfer and action simulation during action observation.
理解大脑中感知和动作是如何结合的，对于培训、康复和脑机接口都有重要的意义。意念运动理论假定，意愿动作是通过先前经历的效果来表示的，并通过对这些效果的预期来启动。相应地，先前的研究发现，如果感官事件以前与动作结果相关联，那么它们可以在运动区域引起活动。然而，目前尚不清楚在感知更自然的动作序列期间诱导的与运动相关的活动实际上是否代表“序列特异性”信息。在本研究中，非音乐家首先接受训练，在钢琴上演奏两首旋律；其次，他们在听这些旋律以及新的、未经训练的旋律时进行 fMRI 实验；第三，使用多元模式分析来测试脑活动的体素模式是否可以识别训练过的，但不是新的旋律。结果重要地表明，在联想学习之后，一系列感官事件可以在感觉和运动网络中引发序列特异性的表示。有趣的是，即使是新的旋律也可以在多个区域（包括默认模式区域）进行分类。一个对照实验证实了这些结果是依赖于训练的。我们讨论了动作感知结合如何能够在动作观察期间实现自发的近迁移和动作模拟。
