Dorsal premotor cortex is related to recognition of verbal and visual descriptions of actions in the first-person perspective

• Published in: Neuroscience letters Vol. 687; pp. 71 - 76
• Main Authors: Shibata, Hiroshi, Ogawa, Kenji
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ireland Elsevier B.V 20.11.2018
• Subjects: Dorsal premotor cortex; Embodied cognition; First-person perspective; fMRI; Second-person perspective; First-person perspective; fMRI; Second-person perspective; Embodied cognition; Dorsal premotor cortex
• ISSN: 0304-3940; 1872-7972
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2018.09.025

•The perspective effect of verbal and visual description of action was examined.•The increased activity in the left PMd was found in the first-person perspective.•The PMd is recruited with a first-person perspective independent of stimulus modality This fMRI study examined whether the perspective difference of a verbally and visually descripted action stimulus (i.e., sentence and picture) modulates activity in the motor-related area. The participants were presented with a sentence (e.g., “I grasp an apple” or “You grasp an apple”) or a picture (e.g., a picture of grasping an apple in which a right hand appears from the bottom or from the top) as the experimental task. A full factorial analysis of variance model with stimulus modality (verbal vs. visual description) and perspective (first- vs. second-person perspective) was used. The fMRI results showed greater activity in the left dorsal premotor cortex in the first-person perspective than in the second-person perspective for both the verbal and visual descriptions. The results suggest that motor representation is more strongly recruited with the recognition of an action-related stimulus descripted in the first-person perspective than in the second-person perspective, independent of stimulus modality.