When sounds become actions: higher-order audiomotor representation of sounds
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1
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain, Germany
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2
Harvard Medical School, United States
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3
Université Paris Descartes, France
In the absence of visual information, our brain can recognize the actions of others by representing their sounds as a motor event. Previous studies have offered evidence of a somatotopic activation of the listener's motor cortex during perception of the sound of over-familiar motor acts. The present experiments studied (i) how the motor system is activated by action-related sounds that are newly acquired, and (ii) whether these sounds are represented with reference to extrinsic features related to action goals rather than with respect to lower-level intrinsic parameters related to the specific movements. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to measure the correspondence between auditory and motor codes in the listener’s motor system. We compared the corticomotor excitability in response to the presentation of auditory stimuli before and after a short training, in which voluntary actions were associated with arbitrary auditory consequences void of a previous motor meaning. We show that novel auditory-motor representations became manifest very rapidly. By disentangling the muscle and action’s goal representations, we further showed that passive listening to newly learnt action-related sounds activated a precise motor representation that depended on the variable contexts to which the individual was exposed to during testing. Our results suggest that the human brain embodies a higher-order auditory-motor representation of perceived actions, which is muscle-independent and corresponds to the action’s goals. Funding: Supported by DFG (Schu2471/1-1), ANR (ANR-08-FASHS-13).
Keywords:
Cognition,
TMS
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Neurophysiology of Cognition and Attention
Citation:
Ticini
L,
Schütz-Bosbach
S,
Weiss
C,
Casile
A and
Waszak
F
(2011). When sounds become actions: higher-order audiomotor representation of sounds.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00435
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Received:
24 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Luca Ticini, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain, Leipzig, Germany, luca.ticini@gmail.com