@article{ref1,
title="A topographical organization for action representation in the human brain",
journal="Human brain mapping",
year="2015",
author="Handjaras, Giacomo and Bernardi, Giulio and Benuzzi, Francesca and Nichelli, Paolo F. and Pietrini, Pietro and Ricciardi, Emiliano",
volume="36",
number="10",
pages="3832-3844",
abstract="How the human brain represents distinct motor features into a unique finalized action still remains undefined. Previous models proposed the distinct features of a motor act to be hierarchically organized in separated, but functionally interconnected, cortical areas. Here, we hypothesized that distinct patterns across a wide expanse of cortex may actually subserve a topographically organized coding of different categories of actions that represents, at a higher cognitive level and independently from the distinct motor features, the action and its final aim as a whole. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and pattern classification approaches on the neural responses of 14 right-handed individuals passively watching short movies of hand-performed tool-mediated, transitive, and meaningful intransitive actions, we were able to discriminate with a high accuracy and characterize the category-specific response patterns. Actions are distinctively coded in distributed and overlapping neural responses within an action-selective network, comprising frontal, parietal, lateral occipital and ventrotemporal regions. This functional organization, that we named action topography, subserves a higher-level and more abstract representation of finalized actions and has the capacity to provide unique representations for multiple categories of actions. Hum Brain Mapp, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="1065-9471",
doi="10.1002/hbm.22881",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hbm.22881"
}