Transfer of interfered motor patterns to self from others

Previous behavioural and neuroimaging data on humans demonstrated that kinematics and the level of brain activity vary according to whether participants reach towards and grasp a target object presented in isolation or flanked by a distractor object. Here we seek to explore whether a differential activation can be revealed by the mere observation of another person grasping an object in isolation or alongside a distractor. To this end we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to localize neural activity related to action observation that was influenced by the presence of a distractor object. We found that observing a human model reaching-to-grasp a three-dimensional target alongside a distractor elicits a differential level of activation in a network of areas typically involved during action observation: the dorsal sectors of the premotor cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus. Whereas our previous understanding of the human action observation system has been restricted to actions directed to single objects, we provide compelling evidence that areas within this network modulate with respect to the context in which the observed action takes place. This may prove to be a fundamental process for our understanding of how others' actions can be represented at a neural level.