A shared neural code for the physics of actions and object events

• Published in: Nature communications 2023-06, Vol.14 (1), p.3316-3316, Article 3316
• Main Authors: Karakose-Akbiyik, Seda, Caramazza, Alfonso, Wurm, Moritz F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 59/36; 59/57; 631/378/2649/1723; 631/477/2811; Brain; Brain Mapping - methods; Cerebral Cortex; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Information processing; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; multidisciplinary; Neural coding; Photic Stimulation - methods; Physics; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Temporal Lobe
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-39062-8

Observing others’ actions recruits frontoparietal and posterior temporal brain regions – also called the action observation network. It is typically assumed that these regions support recognizing actions of animate entities (e.g., person jumping over a box). However, objects can also participate in events with rich meaning and structure (e.g., ball bouncing over a box). So far, it has not been clarified which brain regions encode information specific to goal-directed actions or more general information that also defines object events. Here, we show a shared neural code for visually presented actions and object events throughout the action observation network. We argue that this neural representation captures the structure and physics of events regardless of animacy. We find that lateral occipitotemporal cortex encodes information about events that is also invariant to stimulus modality. Our results shed light onto the representational profiles of posterior temporal and frontoparietal cortices, and their roles in encoding event information. The authors examine how the brain processes actions performed by humans and events involving objects. Their findings suggest that a common neural code is used in the brain’s action observation network to represent event information, regardless of animacy.