Overt and Covert Object Features Mediate Timing of Patterned Brain Activity during Motor Planning

Michelle Marneweck; Scott T Grafton

doi:10.1093/texcom/tgaa080

Overt and Covert Object Features Mediate Timing of Patterned Brain Activity during Motor Planning

Cereb Cortex Commun. 2020 Oct 30;1(1):tgaa080. doi: 10.1093/texcom/tgaa080. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Michelle Marneweck^{1

2

3}, Scott T Grafton⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Human Physiology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1249, USA.
² Monash Biomedical Imaging, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria 3168, Australia.
³ Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria 3168, Australia.
⁴ Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.

Abstract

Humans are seamless in their ability to efficiently and reliably generate fingertip forces to gracefully interact with objects. Such interactions rarely end in awkward outcomes like spilling, crushing, or tilting given advanced motor planning. Here we combine multiband imaging with deconvolution- and Bayesian pattern component modeling of functional magnetic resonance imaging data and in-scanner kinematics, revealing compelling evidence that the human brain differentially represents preparatory information for skillful object interactions depending on the saliency of visual cues. Earlier patterned activity was particularly evident in ventral visual processing stream-, but also selectively in dorsal visual processing stream and cerebellum in conditions of heightened uncertainty when an object's superficial shape was incompatible rather than compatible with a key underlying object feature.

Keywords: motor planning; neural representations; object manipulation; representational similarity analyses; ventral–dorsal.