Action Understanding in the Superior Temporal Sulcus Region

By B. Vander Wyk, C. Hudac, Elizabeth Jeanne Carter, David M. Sobel, Kevin A. Pelphrey. 2009

179 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) region plays an important role in the perception of social acts, although its full role has not been completely clarified. This functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment examined activity in the STS region as participants viewed actions that were congruent or incongruent with intentions established by a previous emotional context. Participants viewed an actress express either a positive or a negative emotion toward one of two objects and then subsequently pick up one of them. If the object that was picked up had received positive regard, or if the object that was not picked up had received negative regard, the action was congruent; otherwise, the action was incongruent. Activity in the right posterior STS region was sensitive to the congruency between the action and the actress's emotional expression (i.e., STS activity was greater on incongruent than on congruent trials). These findings suggest that the posterior STS represents not only biological motion, but also how another person's motion is related to his or her intentions.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, positive): “The goalinconsistent action (reaching for the mug) elicits a higher response in the STS (Vander Wyk et al., 2009).”
Understanding interpersonal action coordination: an fMRI study (2011, methodology): “…movements (Allison et al. 2000; Puce and Perrett 2003), and studies have shown that the activation of the right pSTS is greater while viewing contextincongruent (or unexpected) actions than context-congruent (or expected) ones (Pelphrey et al. 2004; Saxe et al. 2004; Vander Wyk et al. 2009).”
The posterior superior temporal sulcus is sensitive to the outcome of human and non-human goal-directed actions. (2011, result): “Unlike previous studies contrasting goal-directed actions with non-sensical, implausible actions (Pelphrey et al., 2004a; Vander Wyk et al., 2009), all of the actions produced in the current study were clearly goal-directed and therefore consistent with the subject’s expectations.”
Exploring the neural correlates of goal-directed action and intention understanding (2011, unknown): “Vander Wyk et al. (2009) had an actress look at one of two objects, make either a positive or a negative facial expression, and then reach for one of the objects.”
Neural mechanisms of understanding rational actions: middle temporal gyrus activation by contextual violation. (2011, background): “…and Morris 2006), but context was an object that was a possible target of the action (Pelphrey, Singerman, et al. 2003; Pelphrey, Morris, McCarthy 2004), an observer (Pelphrey, Viola, et al. 2004), or was an emotional context provided by the facial expression of the actor (Vander Wyk et al. 2009).”
Exploring Ad-Elicited Emotional Arousal and Memory for the Ad Using fMRI (2013, background): “Consistent with research suggesting that the STS is associated with social cognitive processes (Allison, Puce, and McCarthy 2000; Vander Wyk et al. 2009), coactivation of the STS with the amygdala was shown to be associated with the integration of emotional information (Park et al. 2010), such as fa”
Live face-to-face interaction during fMRI: a new tool for social cognitive neuroscience (2010, unknown): “For example, the pSTS showed greater activity when a virtual character smiled at one object and then reached for the other, compared to smiling at and then reaching for the same object (Wyk et al., 2009).”
Neuronal correlates of altered empathy and social cognition in borderline personality disorder (2011, unknown): “While the posterior STS, particularly in the left hemisphere, has been reported as a prime area for mentalizing (Hein and Knight, 2008), the right STS has been shown to be sensitive to the perceived congruency between a person's action and his/her emotional expression (Wyk et al., 2009).”
Differential selectivity for dynamic versus static information in face-selective cortical regions (2011, unknown): “4 D. Pitcher et al. / NeuroImage xxx (2011) xxx–xxx Please cite this article as: Pitcher, D., et al., Differential selectivity for dynamic versus static information in face-selective cortical regions, NeuroImage (2011) , doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.03.”