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Project

Investigating the visual processing of biological agents: a comparison between humans and non-human primates using fMRI.

Visual object recognition has a long standing tradition in monkey electrophysiology and human imaging. While most of this research has been carried out using manmade inanimate objects, one very important category in everyday life, the human body, has been widely neglected. In the proposed project, we will not only investigate the processing of the body form as such, but also the concept of biological agents, namely the combination of body-shape and body-movement. In a set of fMRI experiments scanning humans and awake behaving monkeys using similar designs, we intend to investigate three main objectives: a) arrive at a more precise description of body areas in the human and monkey brain, using identical stimulus sets for their localization. b) identify the areas that are involved in the integration of form and motion during action processing in the monkey. and c) investigate the extend to which human and monkey occipito-temporal, parietal and premotor areas are sensitive to the specific kinematic constraints of their bodies. These experiments will provide us with the unique opportunity to directly compare the processing of biological agents in humans and monkeys and to link electrophysiological findings from action observation with human imaging.
Date:1 Oct 2010 →  30 Jun 2016
Keywords:Functional imaging, Human, Body shape, Body motion, Catagorical representations, Agency, Action observation, Monkey
Disciplines:Neurosciences, Biological and physiological psychology, Cognitive science and intelligent systems, Developmental psychology and ageing