TY - JOUR
T1 - Neural representation of others during action observation in posterior medial prefrontal cortex
AU - Falcone, Rossella
AU - Cirillo, Rossella
AU - Ceccarelli, Francesco
AU - Genovesio, Aldo
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
PY - 2022/10/8
Y1 - 2022/10/8
N2 - Making decisions based on the actions of others is critical to daily interpersonal interactions. We investigated the representations of other's actions at single neural level in posterior medial prefrontal cortex (pmPFC) in two monkeys during the observation of actions of another agent, in a social interaction task. Each monkey separately interacted with a human partner. The monkey and the human alternated turns as actor and observer. The actor was required to reach one of two visual targets, avoiding the previously chosen target, while the observer monitored that action. pmPFC neurons decoupled in most cases self from others during both the execution and the observation of explicit actions. pmPFC neurons showed selective directional tuning specific for the agent who was executing the task. Moreover, we assessed the relationship of the response coding between the periods immediately before and after the action, by using a cross-modal decoding analysis. We found neural network stability from the action anticipation period to the observation of other's actions, suggesting a strong relationship between the anticipation and the execution of an action. When the monkey was the actor, the population coding appeared dynamic, possibly reflecting a goal-action transformation unique to the monkey's own action execution.
AB - Making decisions based on the actions of others is critical to daily interpersonal interactions. We investigated the representations of other's actions at single neural level in posterior medial prefrontal cortex (pmPFC) in two monkeys during the observation of actions of another agent, in a social interaction task. Each monkey separately interacted with a human partner. The monkey and the human alternated turns as actor and observer. The actor was required to reach one of two visual targets, avoiding the previously chosen target, while the observer monitored that action. pmPFC neurons decoupled in most cases self from others during both the execution and the observation of explicit actions. pmPFC neurons showed selective directional tuning specific for the agent who was executing the task. Moreover, we assessed the relationship of the response coding between the periods immediately before and after the action, by using a cross-modal decoding analysis. We found neural network stability from the action anticipation period to the observation of other's actions, suggesting a strong relationship between the anticipation and the execution of an action. When the monkey was the actor, the population coding appeared dynamic, possibly reflecting a goal-action transformation unique to the monkey's own action execution.
KW - medial prefrontal cortex
KW - monkeys
KW - neural dynamics
KW - social interactions
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U2 - 10.1093/cercor/bhab499
DO - 10.1093/cercor/bhab499
M3 - Article
C2 - 35059697
AN - SCOPUS:85136645723
SN - 1047-3211
VL - 32
SP - 4512
EP - 4523
JO - Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
JF - Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
IS - 20
ER -