Action Representation of Sound: Audiomotor Recognition Network While Listening to Newly Acquired Actions

By Amir Lahav, Elliot Saltzman, Gottfried Schlaug. Journal of Neuroscience, 2007

609 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The discovery of audiovisual mirror neurons in monkeys gave rise to the hypothesis that premotor areas are inherently involved not only when observing actions but also when listening to action-related sound. However, the whole-brain functional formation underlying such “action–listening” is not fully understood. In addition, previous studies in humans have focused mostly on relatively simple and overexperienced everyday actions, such as hand clapping or door knocking. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to ask whether the human action-recognition system responds to sounds found in a more complex sequence of newly acquired actions. To address this, we chose a piece of music as a model set of acoustically presentable actions and trained non-musicians to play it by ear. We then monitored brain activity in subjects while they listened to the newly acquired piece. Although subjects listened to the music without performing any movements, activation was found bilaterally in the frontoparietal motor-related network (including Broca's area, the premotor region, the intraparietal sulcus, and the inferior parietal region), consistent with neural circuits that have been associated with action observations, and may constitute the human mirror neuron system. Presentation of the practiced notes in a different order activated the network to a much lesser degree, whereas listening to an equally familiar but motorically unknown music did not activate this network. These findings support the hypothesis of a “hearing–doing” system that is highly dependent on the individual's motor repertoire, gets established rapidly, and consists of Broca's area as its hub.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d629c7cc0c73f4ebe94b97a0c38e465b1036f4b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Moving on Time: Brain Network for Auditory-Motor Synchronization is Modulated by Rhythm Complexity and Musical Training (2008, background): “It has also been suggested that Broca’s areas 44 and 45 are involved in a structured hierarchy of action selection, independent of temporal arrangement (Koechlin & Jubault, 2006), and could be involved in auditory–motor interactions ( Lahav, Saltzman, & Schlaug, 2007 ).”
Neural Dynamics of Learning Sound—Action Associations (2008, background): “However, compared to learning novel, more finely tuned movements such as playing guitar chords [28], or piano sequences [37] our task requires minimal effort and is only practised briefly in the scanner.”
Being Together in Time: Musical Experience and the Mirror Neuron System (2009, background): “…motor network when listening to piano music, while nonmusicians activate it to a much lesser extent (Bangert & Altenmüller, 2003; Bangert et al., 2006; Haslinger et al., 2005), but also highlights the tremendous plasticity within this system during imitative learning (Lahav et al., 2007).”
Musical training as a framework for brain plasticity: behavior, function, and structure. (2012, methodology): “Lahav et al. (2007) taught nonmusicians to play a familiar melody on the piano over the course of five days and measured their cortical activity using fMRI during listening to the trained and untrained melodies.”
When the brain plays music: auditory–motor interactions in music perception and production (2007, background): “Similarly, non-musicians trained to play a tune on a keyboard demonstrated significant responses in the vPMC, Broca's area and parietal areas only when they subsequently listened to the trained stimulus, and not to equally familiar but motorically untrained melodie”