Citation

Dayan E, Casile A, Levit-Binnun N, Giese MA, Hendler T, Flash T. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2007; 104(51): 20582-20587.

Affiliation

Departments of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Neurobiology, and Physics of Complex Systems, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.0710033104

PMID

18079289

PMCID

PMC2154474

Abstract

Behavioral and modeling studies have established that curved and drawing human hand movements obey the 2/3 power law, which dictates a strong coupling between movement curvature and velocity. Human motion perception seems to reflect this constraint. The functional MRI study reported here demonstrates that the brain's response to this law of motion is much stronger and more widespread than to other types of motion. Compliance with this law is reflected in the activation of a large network of brain areas subserving motor production, visual motion processing, and action observation functions. Hence, these results strongly support the notion of similar neural coding for motion perception and production. These findings suggest that cortical motion representations are optimally tuned to the kinematic and geometrical invariants characterizing biological actions.

Language: en