Action Observation Flashcards
Which neural region is critical for sensorimotor integration by maintaining an internal representation of the body’s state? (Wolpert et al.)
Superior parietal lobe
What has been found when performing both mental rotation tasks and predicting where body parts should be? (Gardner and Potts)
The duration of mental rotation time correlates with the actual rotation time; there’s a relationship between imagined and actual action
Which brain areas are activated for both executed and imagined movement? (Jeanerod et al.)
Frontal areas BA 6; parietal areas BA 40
Describe the differences found in Choudjury et al.’s study between adults and adolescents when executing and imagining the touch fingers to thumb task, and triple 8 within parallel lines task
Touch fingers to thumb: positive correlations between imagined and executed in both age groups; figure 8: a reduced correlation for adolescents compared to adults, suggesting they need to develop more fine tuning for these cognitive representations
When recordings were taken by Blanke et al. from depth electrodes in epileptic patients, what was found when the yellow area (around the posterior parieto-temporal sulcus) was activated?
They reported having an out of body experience (OBE)
Why are out of body experiences (OBEs) more likely to occur lying down than standing vertically, in relation to vestibular, somatosensory and visual cues? (Lopez and Blanke)
When we’re standing upright, our head is aligned with gravity so otolith receptors are in an optimal orientation for coding gravitational acceleration; these signals merge with those from the mechanoreceptors of the plantar sole (informing brain about body position with respect to gravity); When lying down we don’t receive those signals so we’re more likely to misperceive and mis-integrate sensory and environmental cues with respect to the body
In which condition do patients perceive body sensations very differently to normal controls?
Hypoxia during trauma (deficiency in amount of oxygen reaching the tissues)
Our body schema, or representation of our body, can become to an extent independent of sensory inputs from the environment. In which phenomenon does this seem to occur?
Phantom limbs
When Dr. Chandran stroked the cheek of his phantom limb patient, what occurred?
He felt it in his arm; it was hypothesised that the face area represented in somatosensory cortex had expanded to his arm area
Which illusion shows how important vision is in relation to proprioception, and what causes the illusion? (Botvink and Cohen)
Rubber hand illusion - when synchronous stroking of seen fake and occluded real hand, leading to a proprioceptive drift (feeling that the real hand is where the fake hand is; shift of subjective ownership); Vision integrates with touch to result in an illusory percept
What other experimental conditions have replicated the rubber hand illusion, and who shows a delayed induction to this effect?
Block of wood and affective responses (histamine, temperature and knife attack - snatch hand away); Children with autism (may be a multisensory integration deficit)
What have bimodal neurones in the periarcuate cortex of macaques (analogous to PMC in humans) been demonstrated to fire in response to, and when do they fire the greatest? (Rizzolatti et al.)
Visual inputs presented on or near the hand and touch of the skin; Fire greatest for the concurrent presentation of visual and tactile input (multisensory)
Describe the receptive fields of bimodal neurones
They’re limb centred (activation profiles remap with movement of the limb); they expand and contract, and move around
Sensory perception is perceptually based on which two factors?
The action goal; proximity of environmental inputs to limbs
What is peripersonal space?
Reachable/actable space near the body (within 30cm of hands or tools); immediate space updates with limb movement to incorporate where you are acting (not retinotopically mapped)
What do OBE, phantom limb phenomena, rubber hand illusion and hand/vision bimodal neurons tell us about the representation/schema of our body?
It’s dynamic and flexible; can also incorporate non-animate objects
Receptive fields of bimodal neurons in which region of macaque monkey brains enlarge and shrink depending on the use of tools? (Iriki)
Anterior inferior parietal sulcus (same neurons encode for shoulder-centred frame of reference as visual information, but their rate of firing expands when there’s an expansion of peripersonal space)
There is a link between our actions and the environment. How does Gibson (1977) suggest we may not be predisposed to work with tools?
The feature/quality of an object allows an action to happen (e.g certain objects give off affordances, such as handle on a mug); if object is wanted/appropriate it’s released/enacted; if unwanted/inappropriate it’s inhibited/suppressed
Turker and Ellis showed participants pictures of everyday common tools, and had to respond with L or R hand as to whether it’s upright or upside down. What were the results, and what do the findings suggest?
When the handle was facing the right RT was much faster to respond (hand dominance took over) and opposite effect when inverted; Suggests there are learned links between the motor system and the environment
Cream-Regehr et al. investigated whether there’s a neural link between graspable objects and somatotopic activation (triggering areas typically associated with using a particular tool), by Ps showing graspable tools, shapes and scrambled images. What did they find?
Greater left posterior parietal activation for tools, as well as activation of fusiform and middle temporal gyri - identification of the function of the tool and the body part that goes with it
Who said “every mental representation of a movement awakens to some degree the actual movement which it is object”?, and who called this “sympathetic magic?”
William James; Edward Thorndike
In van Leeuwen et al.s ideomotor priming task, participants were cued with a model of a hand lifting a finger or making a shape. They were then instructed to follow the same action (congruent) or a different one (incongruent). What did they find?
Congruent responses were faster than incongruent; responses to fingers were faster than spatial (shape) cues; suggesting that increasing working memory load facilitates behavioural imitation
Mu rhythms/waves are synchronised patterns of electrical activity (8-13hz) from sensorimotor activation, and recorded over motor cortex across a large number or neurons. What happens to this activation when observing, imagining or performing an action?
Mu activation is suppressed/attenuated/abolished (desynchronised); its activation is seen when at rest
What did Muthukumaraswamy et al. find about Mu rhythm modulation during observation of an object directed grasp?
Observing precision grip was associated with greater mu synchronisation (attenuation) than observing a flat hand; suggesting it’s sensitive to different forms of observed behaviours (more complexity = more attenuation)
