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Direction selectivity in naturalistic action observation: distributed representations across the action observation
Zelal Eltaş1,2, Murat B Tunca3,4,5, Burcu A Urgen3,6,4
1Department of Neuroscience , Bilkent University , Ankara, Turkey. zelal.eltas@bilkent.edu.tr.
Brain Structure & Function
|May 4, 2026
Summary
The human brain broadly represents action direction across visual, parietal, and motor areas. This finding reveals how we understand complex, everyday actions by integrating motion processing with higher-level cognitive functions.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Visual Perception
Background:
- Understanding observed actions is crucial for social interaction.
- Direction selectivity is well-studied with simple stimuli but not complex, naturalistic actions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how the brain encodes direction in complex, naturalistic actions.
- To map direction-selective representations within the action observation network (AON).
Main Methods:
- Used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record brain activity.
- Analyzed 96 videos of complex actions across three dimensions (left-right, up-down, front-back).
- Applied multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) and representational similarity analysis (RSA).
Main Results:
- Above-chance classification of action direction was found in occipital, parietal, and motor cortices.
- Highest decoding accuracy for action direction was observed in occipital, primary motor, and somatosensory regions.
- Direction information persisted in sensory and motor regions even after accounting for low-level and motor features.
Conclusions:
- Action direction is represented across multiple levels of the AON, from early sensory to higher-order frontal cortices.
- The brain’s coding of action direction is broadly distributed, reflecting the complexity of real-world action perception.
- Direction selectivity is a fundamental component of the AON, connecting basic motion processing with action understanding.
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