Imagined and Executed Actions in the Human Motor System: Testing Neural Similarity Between Execution and Imagery of Actions with a Multivariate Approach

Abstract

Simulation theory proposes motor imagery (MI) to be a simulation based on representations also used for motor execution (ME). Nonetheless, it is unclear how far they use the same neural code. We use multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) and representational similarity analysis (RSA) to describe the neural representations associated with MI and ME within the frontoparietal motor network. During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, 20 volunteers imagined or executed 3 different types of right-hand actions. Results of MVPA showed that these actions as well as their modality (MI or ME) could be decoded significantly above chance from the spatial patterns of BOLD signals in premotor and posterior parietal cortices. This was also true for cross-modal decoding. Furthermore, representational dissimilarity matrices of frontal and parietal areas showed that MI and ME representations formed separate clusters, but that the representational organization of action types within these clusters was identical. For most ROIs, this pattern of results best fits with a model that assumes a low-to-moderate degree of similarity between the neural patterns associated with MI and ME. Thus, neural representations of MI and ME are neither the same nor totally distinct but exhibit a similar structural geometry with respect to different types of action.

Keywords: MVPA; RSA; action mapping; functional equivalence; motor imagery.