Perceiving troubles from others: a behavioral and fMRI study

From a behavioral and neuronal perspective, observational and physical practice conditions have been theorized to be equivalent during motor task learning. However, some paradigms can challenge such a functional equivalence hypothesis. The perception of difficulties experienced by others may play a role in observational learning by allowing learners to partially distance themselves from these episodes, thereby limiting their impact on learning. In contrast, during physical practice, performance difficulties are directly experienced, which may constrain such distancing mechanisms. Indeed, an observer watching a model that uses a wrong physical strategy can ignore erroneous trials in order to preserve action encoding. The main goal of the present study was to prevent such observer avoidance and to test the cognitive and neuronal functional equivalence between the physical and observational practice groups. During this experiment, both groups learned two motor sequences. Only one sequence was repeatedly interrupted to perturb encoding. Behavioral results revealed that both groups were equally negatively impacted by such interruptions. Together, these findings suggest that while physical and observational practice can lead to comparable behavioral outcomes under strong disruption, they rely on partially distinct neural strategies. Physical practice predominantly engages motor and striato-cerebellar feedback loops, whereas observational learning relies more strongly on fronto-cerebellar and episodic memory networks, highlighting a context-dependent functional equivalence between learning modalities.