Distinct roles of temporal and frontoparietal cortex in representing actions across vision and language

Both temporal and frontoparietal brain areas are associated with the representation of knowledge about the world, in particular about actions. However, what these brain regions represent and precisely how they differ remains unknown. Here, we reveal distinct functional profiles of lateral temporal and frontoparietal cortex using fMRI-based MVPA. Frontoparietal areas encode representations of observed actions and corresponding written sentences in an overlapping way, but these representations do not generalize across stimulus type. By contrast, only left lateral posterior temporal cortex (LPTC) encodes action representations that generalize across observed action scenes and written descriptions. The representational organization of stimulus-general action information in LPTC can be predicted from models that describe basic agent-patient relations (object- and person-directedness) and the general semantic similarity between actions. Our results suggest that LPTC encodes general, conceptual aspects of actions whereas frontoparietal representations appear to be tied to specific stimulus types.