hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
The cortex surrounding the posterior superior temporal sulcus of humans and monkeys is known to be activated during observation of biological movements, including human actions (1,2). In our event-related fMRI experiment, 12 healthy human volunteers were asked to discriminate between 2 versions of four different human actions on the basis of their movement kinematics. The difficulty of the task was influenced by the number of joints showing differences between the two movement versions.
Clusters in the posterior superior temporal sulcus region in both hemispheres were the only brain regions whose activity varied inversely with the number of joints with significant differences between the two movement versions (clusters identified by SPM RFX analysis with 12 subjects thresholded at p<0.001 uncorrected, correlation with activation in left STS: R² = 0.96, right STS: R²= 0.94). Activity in the cluster identified in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus also showed a trend to correlate positively with participants’ performance (non significant, p=0.13).
These results suggest that the cortex surrounding the posterior superior temporal sulcus participates in the extraction of kinematic information from observed biological movements, with activity increasing with task difficulty.
