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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on November 20, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp229
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Neuronal Encoding of Human Kinematic Invariants during Action Observation

Antonino Casile1, Eran Dayan2,3, Vittorio Caggiano1, Talma Hendler4,5, Tamar Flash2 and Martin A. Giese1,6,7

1 Department of Cognitive Neurology, Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany, 2 Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel, 3 Department of Neurobiology, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel, 4 Functional Brain Imaging Unit, Wohl Institute for Advanced Imaging, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv 64361, Israel, 5 Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel, 6 Section for Computational Sensomotorics, Center for Integrative Neurosciences, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany, 7 School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor LL57 2AS, UK

Address correspondence to Dr Antonino Casile, Department of Cognitive Neurology, Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen, Otfried-Müller-Strasse 27, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. Email: antonino.casile{at}uni-tuebingen.de.

Human movements, besides entailing the presence of a body shape, comply with characteristic kinematic laws of motion. Psychophysical studies show that low-level motion perception is biased toward stimuli complying with these laws. However, the neuronal structures that are sensitive to the kinematic laws of observed bodily movements are still largely unknown. We investigated this issue by dissociating, by means of computer-generated characters, form and motion information during the observation of human movements. In a functional imaging experiment, we compared the levels of blood oxygen level–dependent activity elicited by human actions complying with or violating the kinematic laws of human movements. Actions complying with normal kinematic laws of motion differentially activated the left dorsal premotor and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as well as the medial frontal cortex. These findings suggest that the kinematic laws of human movements specifically modulate the responses of neuronal circuits also involved in action recognition and that are predominantly located in the left frontal lobe.

Key Words: action observation • biological motion • functional magnetic resonance imaging • kinematic invariants

Antonino Casile and Eran Dayan have contributed equally to this work.


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