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When action prediction grows old: An fMRI study - PubMed

  • ️Sun Jan 01 2023

. 2023 Feb 1;44(2):373-387.

doi: 10.1002/hbm.26049. Epub 2022 Aug 23.

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When action prediction grows old: An fMRI study

Lucia Maria Sacheli et al. Hum Brain Mapp. 2023.

Abstract

Predicting the unfolding of others' actions (action prediction) is crucial for successfully navigating the social world and interacting efficiently. Age-related changes in this domain have remained largely unexplored, especially for predictions regarding simple gestures and independent of contextual information or motor expertise. Here, we evaluated whether healthy aging impacts the neurophysiological processes recruited to anticipate, from the observation of implied-motion postures, the correct conclusion of simple grasping and pointing actions. A color-discrimination task served as a control condition to assess the specificity of the age-related effects. Older adults showed reduced efficiency in performance that was yet not specific to the action prediction task. Nevertheless, fMRI results revealed task-specific age-related differences: while both groups showed stronger recruitment of the lateral occipito-temporal cortex bilaterally during the action prediction than the control task, the younger participants additionally showed a higher bilateral engagement of parietal regions. Importantly, in both groups, the recruitment of visuo-motor processes in the right posterior parietal cortex was a predictor of good performance. These results support the hypothesis of decreased involvement of sensorimotor processes in cognitive tasks when processing action- and body-related stimuli in healthy aging. These results have implications for social interaction, which requires the fast reading of others' gestures.

Keywords: action prediction; aging; fMRI; lateral occipito-temporal cortex.

© 2022 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1

The figure illustrates the trial‐time line, which was identical in the action prediction (upper panel) and the control (lower panel) tasks. The only difference between the two tasks resided in the implied‐motion image, which was substituted by an image including the colored square (black or white) in the control task. After the go‐signal, the participants were required to decide whether the last image correctly concluded the movement previously seen (action prediction task) or matched with the previously seen colored square (control task). The red frames indicate the onset of the event of interest in the fMRI analyses.

FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2

The figure illustrates the distribution of the action prediction (AP) indexes of performance, calculated on the sensitivity (d′, left) and Inverse Efficiency Scores (IES, right) data. The AP indexes normalize each individual's performance at the action prediction task on the performance obtained at the control task (differences expressed in percentage). The raw data are reported in Table 1. The gray dots indicate individual data and the black squares the group means. In the d′, the lower the values the worse the sensitivity in the action prediction compared to the control task; in the IES, the higher the values the worse the performance efficiency in the action prediction compared to the control task. As shown by the formal analyses comparing the indexes and by the ANOVA performed on both the d′ and the IES raw data, the age‐related decay in performance was not specific to the action prediction task.

FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3

The figure illustrates the simple effect of the contrast “action prediction > control task” (a) in the older participants (red), and (b) in the younger participants (cyan). A formal conjunction analysis (c, violet) revealed that the lateral occipito‐temporal cortices were commonly recruited by the older and the younger participants. This is also illustrated by the histograms plotting the contrast estimates (beta values, the error bars in the plot indicate the 90% confidence intervals) at the local maxima of the right occipito‐temporal cluster (MNI 54, −62, 4). All the data are reported by applying the same statistical threshold reported in the tables and discussed in the text (p uncorr < .001 at the voxel level and p FWER‐corr < .05 at the cluster level).

FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4

The figure (left, yellow) illustrates the hypo‐activation shown by the older as compared to the younger participants during the action prediction (as compared to the control) task. The data are reported by applying the same statistical threshold as that reported in the tables and discussed in the text (p uncorr < .001 at the voxel level and p FWER‐corr <.05 at the cluster level). The graph on the right plots the parametric association between the brain activations in the action prediction (as compared to the control) task in the right superior parietal lobule (individual adjusted values in the MNI coordinate 36, −50, 70, “y” values in the general linear model [GLM]) and the performance achieved by the participants at the task as measured by the Inverse Efficiency Scores (IES) action prediction (AP) index. The red dots indicate the older participants' data and the cyan dots the younger participants' ones.

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