“Left and right prefrontal routes to action comprehension”
Data
2023Egilea
Amoruso, Lucia
Finisguerra, Alessandra
Urgesi, Cosimo
Amoruso, L., Finisguerra, A., Urgesi, C. (2023). "Left and right prefrontal routes to action comprehension". Cortex, 163, 1-13. Doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2023.01.015
Cortex
Cortex
Laburpena
Successful action comprehension requires the integration of motor information and semantic
cues about objects in context. Previous evidence suggests that while motor features
are dorsally encoded in the fronto-parietal action observation network (AON); semantic
features are ventrally processed in temporal structures. Importantly, these dorsal and
ventral routes seem to be preferentially tuned to low (LSF) and high (HSF) spatial frequencies,
respectively. Recently, we proposed a model of action comprehension where we
hypothesized an additional route to action understanding whereby coarse LSF information
about objects in context is projected to the dorsal AON via the prefrontal cortex (PFC),
providing a prediction signal of the most likely intention afforded by them. Yet, this model
awaits for experimental testing. To this end, we used a perturb-and-measure continuous
theta burst stimulation (cTBS) approach, selectively disrupting neural activity in the left
and right PFC and then evaluating the participant's ability to recognize filtered action
stimuli containing only HSF or LSF. We find that stimulation over PFC triggered different
spatial-frequency modulations depending on lateralization: left-cTBS and right-cTBS led to
poorer performance on HSF and LSF action stimuli, respectively. Our findings suggest that
left and right PFC exploit distinct spatial frequencies to support action comprehension,
providing evidence for multiple routes to social perception in humans.