Continuous Theta-Burst Stimulation Demonstrates a Causal Role of Premotor Homunculus in Action Understanding

John Michael*, Kristian Sandberg, Joshua Skewes, Thomas Wolf, Jakob Blicher, Morten Overgaard, Chris D. Frith

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Although it is well established that regions of premotor cortex (PMC) are active during action observation, it remains controversial whether they play a causal role in action understanding. In the experiment reported here, we used off-line continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) to investigate this question. Participants received cTBS over the hand and lip areas of left PMC, in separate sessions, before completing a pantomime-recognition task in which half of the trials contained pantomimed hand actions, and half contained pantomimed mouth actions. The results reveal a double dissociation: Participants were less accurate in recognizing pantomimed hand actions after receiving cTBS over the hand area than over the lip area and less accurate in recognizing pantomimed mouth actions after receiving cTBS over the lip area than over the hand area. This finding constrains theories of action understanding by showing that somatotopically organized regions of PMC contribute causally to action understanding and, thus, that the mechanisms underpinning action understanding and action performance overlap.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)963-972
Number of pages10
JournalPsychological Science
Volume25
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2014
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • action understanding
  • mirror-neuron system
  • social cognition
  • social interaction
  • social perception
  • theory of mind
  • theta-burst stimulation

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Continuous Theta-Burst Stimulation Demonstrates a Causal Role of Premotor Homunculus in Action Understanding'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this