Project Details
Projekt
This project investigates the influence of motor learning mediated by different sensory systems (purely auditory or purely visual) on the auditory or visual perception of movements, the crossmodal interactions and its neural processing (especially within the structures of the mirror neuron system).
Applicant
Dr. Annerose Engel
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
from 2008 to 2011
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 106701844
The mirror-neuron system is assumed to be the neural basis for a direct matching between observation and motor representations of actions and is considered to mediate the understanding of actions and intentions. There seems to be a similar system for the auditory domain that matches a heard action to the according motor representation. However, the crossmodal interactions within the system have not yet been systematically investigated: Do the auditory and the visual mirror system share the same neural substrate? If humans learn one action by observation, does the mirror system respond to the sound of the same action? The proposed research project aims at investigating these questions by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans and innovative repetition suppression (RS) paradigms that support a high spatial resolution for the localization of identified brain activity. The actions to be studied will be sequences of finger movements on a piano keyboard, which will be learned in a motor training either by listening to a melody or by observation of finger movements. Furthermore, functional as well as behavioural data will be related to structural data: Differences in white matter pathways in each single participant will be examined using diffusion weighted imaging (DWI), in order to correlate the obtained values to differential performance parameters during a motor training and individual hemodynamic responses in relevant brain areas during a (motor) perception task.
DFG Programme
Research Fellowships
International Connection
Netherlands
