ALE meta-analysis of action observation and imitation in the human brain

By Svenja Caspers, Karl Zilles, Angela R. Laird, Simon B. Eickhoff. NeuroImage, 2010

1,312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the last decade, many neuroimaging studies have assessed the human brain networks underlying action observation and imitation using a variety of tasks and paradigms. Nevertheless, questions concerning which areas consistently contribute to these networks irrespective of the particular experimental design and how such processing may be lateralized remain unresolved. The current study aimed at identifying cortical areas consistently involved in action observation and imitation by combining activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis with probabilistic cytoarchitectonic maps. Meta-analysis of 139 functional magnetic resonance and positron emission tomography experiments revealed a bilateral network for both action observation and imitation. Additional subanalyses for different effectors within each network revealed highly comparable activation patterns to the overall analyses on observation and imitation, respectively, indicating an independence of these findings from potential confounds. Conjunction analysis of action observation and imitation meta-analyses revealed a bilateral network within frontal premotor, parietal, and temporo-occipital cortex. The most consistently rostral inferior parietal area was PFt, providing evidence for a possible homology of this region to macaque area PF. The observation and imitation networks differed particularly with respect to the involvement of Broca's area: whereas both networks involved a caudo-dorsal part of BA 44, activation during observation was most consistent in a more rostro-dorsal location, i.e., dorsal BA 45, while activation during imitation was most consistent in a more ventro-caudal aspect, i.e., caudal BA 44. The present meta-analysis thus summarizes and amends previous descriptions of the human brain networks related to action observation and imitation.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/154e967b29980cb3f93ddc6f9faa29c511bc003a

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Citations in the corpus

Meta-analytical definition and functional connectivity of the human vestibular cortex (2012, methodology): “To compute the conjunction between two ALE analyses, we used the conservative minimum statistic (Nichols et al., 2005), which is equivalent to identifying the intersection between the two cluster-level corrected results (Caspers et al., 2010).”
Empathy: Gender effects in brain and behavior (2014, background): “Indeed, a recent meta-analysis includes more than a hundred fMRI studies (Caspers et al., 2010) and supports the early conclusions that there are human brain hubs showing strong patterns of activity suggesting mirroring, including the posterior inferior frontal and the anterior inferior parietal…”
How is our self related to midline regions and the default-mode network? (2011, methodology): “Compared with recent coordinate-based meta-analysis (Caspers et al., 2010; Fan et al., 2011; Kim, 2011; Sabatinelli et al., 2011), the present study selected the coordinates within different clusters from the total self condition randomly to make four subgroups, and got similar results.”
Brain regions with mirror properties: a meta-analysis of 125 human fMRI studies. (2012, methodology): “Others have used tasks involving stimuli across a range of modalities, including audition (e.g., Gazzola et al., 2006; Lewis et al., 2005; Tettamanti et al., 2005), somatosensation (e.g., Keysers et al., 2004; Schaefer et al. 2009), vision only (e.g., Molnar-Szakacs et al., 2006; Newman-Norlund et…”
The BrainMap strategy for standardization, sharing, and meta-analysis of neuroimaging data (2011, methodology): “The Talairach Daemon is utilized by BrainMap to apply anatomical labels to coordinates archived in the databases and to label the centers of mass of ALE meta-analysis results in GingerALE .”
The human vestibular cortex revealed by coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis. (2012, methodology): “During the last few years, this method has been applied to identify the motor cortex involved in execution/observation of movements (Caspers et al., 2010), or to identify brain regions involved in audition (Petacchi et al.”
Cortical abnormalities in bipolar disorder: an MRI analysis of 6503 individuals from the ENIGMA Bipolar Disorder Working Group (2017, neutral): “The inferior parietal lobe is involved in sensorimotor integration of the mirror neuron system 71 and language tasks.”
Co-activation patterns distinguish cortical modules, their connectivity and functional differentiation (2011, methodology): “Regions that co-activated with both clusters delineated in the medial premotor cortex by the co-activation based parcellation were identified using a minimum-statistic conjunction by computing the intersection of the thresholded ALE-maps (Caspers et al., 2010; Kurth et al., 2010).”
Minimizing Within-Experiment and Within-Group Effects in Activation Likelihood Estimation Meta-Analyses (2011, background): “, 2009; Turkeltaub and Coslett, 2010], or to compare activity between processes or populations [Caspers et al., 2010; Chouinard and Goodale, 2010; Maisog et al., 2008; Minzenberg et al., 2009; Spreng et al., 2010; Vytal and Hamann, 2009].”