Specific Involvement of Human Parietal Systems and the Amygdala in the Perception of Biological Motion

By E. Bonda, Michael Petrides, D. Ostry, Alan C. Evans. 1996

To explore the extent to which functional systems within the human posterior parietal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus are involved in the perception of action, we measured cerebral metabolic activity in human subjects by positron emission tomography during the perception of simulations of biological motion with point-light displays. The experimental design involved comparisons of activity during the perception of goal-directed hand action, whole body motion, object motion, and random motion. The results demonstrated that the perception of scripts of goal-directed hand action implicates the cortex in the intraparietal sulcus and the caudal part of the superior temporal sulcus, both in the left hemisphere. By contrast, the rostrocaudal part of the right superior temporal sulcus and adjacent temporal cortex, and limbic structures such as the amygdala, are involved in the perception of signs conveyed by expressive body movements.

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, neutral): “…are implicated in many aspects of social action perception, showing robust responses to face and body action in both humans (Jellema et al., 2000; Puce et al., 1998; Bonda et al., 1996; Allison et al., 2002) and monkeys (Perrett et al., 1985; Jellema and Perrett, 2003b; Jellema and Perrett, 2003a).”
Reading the mind in cartoons and stories: an fMRI study of 'theory of mind' in verbal and nonverbal tasks. (2000, background): “[4] (x, y, and z, coordinates: 56, ÿ54, 8) by the perception of simulated hand actions and body movements compared to object and random motion.”
Perception of human motion. (2007, background): “Using PET, Bonda et al. (1996) identified regions along the posterior portions of the superior temporal sulcus (STSp) that were activated when people viewed coherent, but not scrambled, point-light actions.”
Perception and production of biological movement in patients with early periventricular brain lesions. (2003, background): “PET shows that the parietotemporal junction, basal temporal regions (fusiform gyrus and temporal poles adjacent to the amygdala) and extrastriate cortex are involved in the perception of actions represented in point-light displays (Bonda et al., 1996; Castelli et al., 2000).”
Towards the neurobiology of emotional body language (2006, unknown): “These feedforward effects of EMG (electromyography) occur in parallel with feedback effects on the amygdala from detailed stimulus processing in the ventral cortex, as has been shown for fusiform cortex to amygdala modulations 33,34,102 .”
Perception of biological motion in parietal patients. (2003, background): “His lesion in the left hemisphere includes portions of the parietal lobe that has been demonstrated by fMRI studies to be involved with perception of meaningful body movement ( Bonda, Petrides, Ostry, & Evans, 1996 ).”
The neural basis of visual body perception (2007, background): “Instead, the processing of biologically plausible motion has been linked to other areas that are typically activated by PLDs, such as the posterior STS (pSTS”
Two Takes on the Social Brain: A Comparison of Theory of Mind Tasks (2007, unknown): “... with perception of biological motion, action understanding, and changeable aspects of faces such as expression and gaze direction (Iacoboni et al., 2005; Saygin, Wilson, Hagler, Bates, & Sereno, 2004; Beauchamp, Lee, Haxby, & Martin, 2003; Montgomery, Gobbini, & Haxby, 2003; Grossman et al., 200”
Exploring the neural correlates of goal-directed action and intention understanding (2011, unknown): “The right pSTS has been implicated in processing biological motion (e.g., Bonda et al., 1996; Pelphrey et al., 2003a; Puce et al., 1998).”
Dissociable Neural Pathways Are Involved in the Recognition of Emotion in Static and Dynamic Facial Expressions (2003, unknown): “…emotionally neutral faces versus nonfacial objects was also associated with activation of regions (amygdala, STS, Broca's area, extrastriate cortex; Table 1) consistent with the perception of biological motion in social stimuli (Bonda et al., 1996; Kawashima et al., 1999; Allison et al., 2000).”
A systems approach to appraisal mechanisms in emotion (2005, unknown): “Amygdala activation was also found when processing point-light sequences simulating meaningful body motion vs. non-biological movement (Bonda, Petrides, Ostry, & Evans, 1996); when hearing one’s own name, as compared with a beep, during sleep (Portas et al., 2000); and when viewing highly…”
The enactive mind, or from actions to cognition: lessons from autism. (2003, background): “A positron emission tomography study attempting to separate decontextualized human motions (point-light displays depicting a hand bringing a cup to one’s mouth) from what can be seen as a more naturalistic human motion (a person dancing) showed that the perception of the latter also implicated limbi”