Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on May 30, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(2):315-326; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn083
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Sensitivity of the Action Observation Network to Physical and Observational Learning
1 Department of Psychology, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA, 2 Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 93106, CA, USA, 3 Department of Psychology, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA, 4 School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
Address correspondence to Scott T. Grafton, MD, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 93106, CA, USA. Email: grafton{at}psych.ucsb.edu.
Human motor skills can be acquired by observation without the benefit of immediate physical practice. The current study tested if physical rehearsal and observational learning share common neural substrates within an action observation network (AON) including premotor and inferior parietal regions, that is, areas activated both for execution and observation of similar actions. Participants trained for 5 days on dance sequences set to music videos. Each day they physically rehearsed one set of dance sequences ("danced"), and passively watched a different set of sequences ("watched"). Functional magnetic resonance imaging was obtained prior to and immediately following the 5 days of training. After training, a subset of the AON showed a degree of common activity for observational and physical learning. Activity in these premotor and parietal regions was sustained during observation of sequences that were danced or watched, but declined for unfamiliar sequences relative to the pretraining scan session. These imaging data demonstrate the emergence of action resonance processes in the human brain based on observational learning without physical practice and identify commonalities in the neural substrates for physical and observational learning.
Key Words: dance • mirror neuron system • motor learning • parietal • premotor
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