Neural bases of action abstraction

There has been recent debate over whether actions are processed primarily by means of motor simulation or cognitive semantics. The current study investigated how abstract action concepts are processed in the brain, independent of the format in which they are presented. Eighteen healthy adult participants viewed different actions (e.g., diving, boxing) in the form of verbs and schematic action pictograms while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was collected. We predicted that sensorimotor and semantic brain regions would show similar patterns of neural activity for different instances of the same action (e.g., diving pictogram and the word 'diving'). A representational similarity analysis revealed posterior temporal and sensorimotor regions where specific action concepts were encoded, independent of the format of presentation. These results reveal the neural instantiations of abstract action concepts, and demonstrate that both sensorimotor and semantic systems are involved in processing actions.