Beyond motor scheme: a supramodal distributed representation in the action-observation network

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Sensory Processing

Background:

• Action representation in the brain is believed to be distributed.
• Recent research suggests action representations are independent of specific sensory modalities.
• The extent to which these representations are truly supramodal (common across senses) is under investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the supramodal nature of action representation.
• To determine if action representations share common coding across visual and auditory sensory modalities.
• To examine neural responses in sighted and congenitally blind individuals.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a pattern recognition approach, specifically multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA).
• Analyzed neural responses during visual and auditory presentation of actions.
• Compared responses in sighted and congenitally blind participants, including during actual motor execution.

Main Results:

• MVPA classifiers successfully distinguished action from non-action stimuli across sensory modalities and participant groups.
• Classifiers identified neural patterns during actual motor execution as 'action'.
• Discriminative information was found in a bilateral, left-prevalent network overlapping with the action-observation network and human mirror system.

Conclusions:

• Findings support a supramodal, distributed functional representation of actions.
• This representation primarily resides within the action-observation network.
• The ability to decode action features irrespective of sensory modality in both sighted and blind individuals underscores this supramodal coding.