AUTHOR=Di Cesare Giuseppe , Valente Giancarlo , Di Dio Cinzia , Ruffaldi Emanuele , Bergamasco Massimo , Goebel Rainer , Rizzolatti Giacomo 

TITLE=Vitality Forms Processing in the Insula during Action Observation: A Multivoxel Pattern Analysis

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2016

YEAR=2016

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00267

DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2016.00267

ISSN=1662-5161

ABSTRACT=Observing how an action is done by others allows the observer to understand the cognitive state of the agent. This information, carried by the kinematics of the observed action, has been defined by Stern “vitality forms”. In the present experiment we presented  participants with videos showing hand actions performed with different velocities and asked them to judge their vitality form (gentle, neutral, rude) or their velocity (slow, medium, fast). Previous studies showed that the dorso-central insula is selectively active both during vitality form observation and execution. The aim of the present study was to assess, using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), whether in the insula there were voxels discriminating vitality form from velocity. Results showed that, consistently across subjects, in the dorso-central sector of the insula there were voxels selectively tuned to vitality forms. These results indicate that the dorso-central insula, which previous data showed involved in the vitality form processing contains voxels specific for the action style processing.