The cognitive and neural architecture of action representations
Final Report Abstract
In this project we aimed to determine according to which principles human participants recognize and distinguish between different actions. To address this question, we proposed to study the cognitive and neural architecture underlying the organization of observed actions. To do so, we carried out a series of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments, using a wide range of actions depicted as static images. These experiments revealed that human participants tend to sort actions according to meaningful categories such as locomotion, communicative actions, and food-related actions. Moreover, we identified a number of high-level features that contribute to the distinction between different action categories, e.g. the features Keeping balance for the category Sport-related actions, and the features Targeting a person and Contact with others for the category Interaction. Our neuroimaging studies furthermore revealed that the similarity structure of a wide range of actions, determined behaviourally, is captured by patterns of activations across the dorsal and the ventral stream, with a specific role of the lateral pathway (recently suggested as a third visual pathway). Moreover, we were able to demonstrate that it is possible to distinguish between different superordinate action categories on the basis of patterns of activations, again with a preference for regions of the lateral pathway. Finally, we obtained that the processing of different superordinate action categories recruits overlapping but also unique portions of the ventral, dorsal and lateral pathways. Together, these results provide important extensions of previous studies, highlighting the kind of representations that support action understanding.
Publications
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Sehen, Verstehen, Handeln. Wie Bewegungen im Gehirn entstehen. Blick in die Wissenschaft, Forschungsmagazin der Universität Regensburg, Heft 40
Lingnau, A.
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The representational space of observed actions. eLife, 8.
Tucciarelli, Raffaele; Wurm, Moritz; Baccolo, Elisa & Lingnau, Angelika
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Revealing the architecture underlying the representation of observed actions - evidence from behavioral and fMRI studies. Journal of Vision, 21(9), 2109.
Kabulska, Zuzanna & Lingnau, Angelika
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Neural representations of action categories. Poster presented at the Minerva-Gentner-Symposium ‘Perception, recognition and control of goal-directed actions: from cognitive to neural representations, Regensburg
Kabulska, Z. & Lingnau, A.
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Revealing dimensions underlying the organization of observed actions. 2022 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience. Cognitive Computational Neuroscience.
Kabulska, Zuzanna & Lingnau, Angelika
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The cognitive structure underlying the organization of observed actions. Behavior Research Methods, 55(4), 1890-1906.
Kabulska, Zuzanna & Lingnau, Angelika
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Decoding Action Categories from Brain Activity and Connectivity Patterns. Poster presented at the Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference, Regensburg
Kabulska, Z. & Lingnau, A.
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Decoding Action Categories from Neural Activity Patterns. Poster presented at the Concept, Actions and Objects (CAOs) Workshop, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy
Kabulska, Z. & Lingnau, A.
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Overlapping representations of observed actions and action‐related features. Human Brain Mapping, 45(3).
Kabulska, Zuzanna; Zhuang, Tonghe & Lingnau, Angelika
