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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on March 25, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp049
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Movement-Specific Repetition Suppression in Ventral and Dorsal Premotor Cortex during Action Observation

Jasminka Majdandzic1,2, Harold Bekkering1,2, Hein T. van Schie3 and Ivan Toni1,2

1 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, 2 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Center for Cognition, 3 Behavioral Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 HB Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Address correspondence to email: j.majdandzic{at}donders.ru.nl.

There are several models of premotor cortex contributions to sensorimotor behavior. For instance, the ventral premotor cortex (PMv) appears to be involved in processing visuospatial object properties for grasping, whereas the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) is involved in using arbitrary rules to guide advance motor planning. These models have focused on individual movements. Here, we examine the premotor responses evoked during the processing of individual movements functionally embedded in an action. We tested whether processing hand–object interactions and action end states would differentially engage PMv and PMd. We used a repetition suppression (RS)–functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm in which we independently manipulated the observed grip, the end position of the object (independent of its spatial location), and the hand trajectory. By comparing novel and repeated trials for each of these action components, we could isolate RS effects specific to each of them. Repeating the grasp component attenuated activity in right PMv, whereas repeating the end state of the action reduced blood oxygen level–dependent activity in the left PMd. These results suggest that PMv is involved in controlling the kinematic means of an appropriate hand–object interaction, whereas PMd is focused on specifying the desired end state of an action.

Key Words: action observation • PMd • PMv • premotor cortex • repetition suppression


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