Cortical Activation to Action Perception is Associated with Action Production Abilities in Young Infants

The extent to which perception and action share common neural processes is much debated in cognitive neuroscience. Taking a developmental approach to this issue allows us to assess whether perceptual processing develops in close association with the emergence of related action skills within the same individual. The current study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate the perception of human action in 4- to 6-month-old human infants. In addition, the infants' manual dexterity was assessed using the fine motor component of The Mullen Scales of Early Learning and an in-house developed Manual Dexterity task. Results show that the degree of cortical activation, within the posterior superior temporal sulcus—temporoparietal junction (pSTS-TPJ) region, to the perception of manual actions in individual infants correlates with their own level of fine motor skills. This association was not fully explained by either measures of global attention (i.e., looking time) or general developmental stage. This striking concordance between the emergence of motor skills and related perceptual processing within individuals is consistent with experience-related cortical specialization in the developing brain.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Cerebral Cortex

• Publication date

  2013-08-23

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/cercor/bht207PMID 23975948PMCID 4303799
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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