Investigating the neural basis of basic human movement perception using multi-voxel pattern analysis

Humans can skillfully recognize actions from others’ body motion and make a judgment or response at once. Previous neuroimaging studies have mostly utilized diminished and brief human motion stimuli and indicated that human occipito-temporal cortex plays a critical role at biological motion recognition. It remains unclear to what extent that the areas related to human motion perception are involved in decoding basic movements. Because human movement naturally stems from the sequences of body posture, so we utilized the stimulus of real movements. Participants were presented four categories of human movements (jump, run, skip and walk) in a blocked fMRI experiment. Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) was adopted to assess whether different movements could be discriminated in four regions. We found that movement-specific information was represented in both human body-sensitive areas, extrastriate body area (EBA) and motion-sensitive areas, posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and human middle temporal complex (hMT+). Additionally, a further functional connectivity analysis using EBA as a seed was conducted and it suggested that EBA showed a task-modulated functional connectivity with multiple areas that were involved in the behavior perception and motor control. Human motion processing appeared to be completed in a distributed network. The occipito-temporal cortex may perform the initial processing of human motion information extracting, and then transform them to interconnected areas for a further utilization.