A shared neural code for the physics of actions and object events
Akbiyik, S.; Caramazza, A.; Wurm, M. F.
Show abstract
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.
Matching journals
The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Invariant Representation of Physical Stability in the Human Brain 97%
- A generalized cortical activity pattern at internally-generated mental context boundaries during unguided narrative recall 96%
- Social navigation: distance and grid-like codes support navigation of abstract social space in the human brain 95%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.