Colloquium Marleen Schippers

Marleen Schippers houdt een afstudeercolloquium met als onderwerp: Brain activity during observation of interacting geometrical figures: is the mirror system involved?.

For this master\'s thesis for Artificial Intelligence, a pilot fMRI study was conducted in which the perception of action is investigated. In particular the recruitment of the mirror system in the observation of interacting geometrical figures is investigated.

The mirror system consists of areas in the human brain which are active during both the observation of an action and during the execution of an action. We studied whether the abstractness and the kinematics of the agent performing the action have an effect on the activity in these areas. Subjects first observed movies showing interacting geometrical figures and then movies of real entities (humans or balls) performing similar actions.

Finally, subjects mentally simulated actions similar to those they saw in the movies. If the mirror system is involved in interpreting both the abstracted, Heider and Simmel-like movies and the real movies of actions, areas involved in execution (in our case imagination) should be activated during the observation of both these movies.

Our results indicate that similar neural networks are recruited for the processing of actions done by either humans, balls or dots (following either biological (human) or physical kinematics). Mirroring voxels were found in the primary visual areas, Brodmann areas 6 and 44, inferior and superior parietal lobule, posterior superior temporal sulcus and the adjacent middle temporal gyrus.

These similarities in brain response to our four different conditions show that these motion patterns are processed as actions even though the agents and their kinematics are unlikely to be encountered in daily life.