Inferring occluded projectile motion changes connectivity within a visuo-fronto-parietal network.

Autor: Zbären GA; Neural Control of Movement Lab, Department of Health Science and technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. gabrielle.zbaeren@hest.ethz.ch., Kapur M; Professorship for Learning Sciences and Higher Education, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland., Meissner SN; Neural Control of Movement Lab, Department of Health Science and technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland., Wenderoth N; Neural Control of Movement Lab, Department of Health Science and technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.; Future Health Technologies, Singapore-ETH Centre, Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore, Singapore.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Brain structure & function [Brain Struct Funct] 2024 Sep; Vol. 229 (7), pp. 1605-1615. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Jun 25.
DOI: 10.1007/s00429-024-02815-2
Abstrakt: Anticipating the behaviour of moving objects in the physical environment is essential for a wide range of daily actions. This ability is thought to rely on mental simulations and has been shown to involve frontoparietal and early visual areas. Yet, the connectivity patterns between these regions during intuitive physical inference remain largely unknown. In this study, participants underwent fMRI while performing a task requiring them to infer the parabolic trajectory of an occluded ball falling under Newtonian physics, and a control task. Building on our previous research showing that when solving the physical inference task, early visual areas encode task-specific and perception-like information about the inferred trajectory, the present study aimed to (i) identify regions that are functionally coupled with early visual areas during the physical inference task, and (ii) investigate changes in effective connectivity within this network of regions. We found that early visual areas are functionally connected to a set of parietal and premotor regions when inferring occluded trajectories. Using dynamic causal modelling, we show that predicting occluded trajectories is associated with changes in effective connectivity within a parieto-premotor network, which may drive internally generated early visual activity in a top-down fashion. These findings offer new insights into the interaction between early visual and frontoparietal regions during physical inference, contributing to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the ability to predict physical outcomes.
(© 2024. The Author(s).)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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