Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1893/34570
Appears in Collections:Psychology Journal Articles
Peer Review Status: Refereed
Title: The neural response is heightened when watching a person approaching compared to walking away: Evidence for dynamic social neuroscience
Author(s): Mustile, Magda
Kourtis, Dimitrios
Edwards, Martin G.
Donaldson, David I.
Ietswaart, Magdalena
Contact Email: magda.mustile@stir.ac.uk
Keywords: Action observation, Mirror neuron system,Brain oscillations,Perspective, Gait
Issue Date: 10-Oct-2022
Date Deposited: 20-Sep-2022
Citation: Mustile M, Kourtis D, Edwards MG, Donaldson DI & Ietswaart M (2022) The neural response is heightened when watching a person approaching compared to walking away: Evidence for dynamic social neuroscience. Neuropsychologia, 175, Art. No.: 108352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108352
Abstract: The action observation network has been proposed to play a key role in predicting the action intentions (or goals) of others, thereby facilitating social interaction. Key information when interacting with others is whether someone (an agent) is moving towards or away from us, indicating whether we are likely to interact with the person. In addition, to determine the nature of a social interaction, we also need to take into consideration the distance of the agent relative to us as the observer. How this kind of information is processed within the brain is unknown, at least in part because prior studies have not involved live whole-body motion. Consequently, here we recorded mobile EEG in 18 healthy participants, assessing the neural response to the modulation of direction (walking towards or away) and distance (near vs. far distance) during the observation of an agent walking. We evaluated whether cortical alpha and beta oscillations were modulated differently by direction and distance during action observation. We found that alpha was only modulated by distance, with a stronger decrease of power when the agent was further away from the observer, regardless of direction. Critically, by contrast, beta was found to be modulated by both distance and direction, with a stronger decrease of power when the agent was near and facing the participant (walking towards) compared to when they were near but viewed from the back (walking away). Analysis revealed differences in both the timing and distribution of alpha and beta oscillations. We argue that these data suggest a full understanding of action observation requires a new dynamic neuroscience, investigating actual interactions between real people, in real world environments.
DOI Link: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108352
Rights: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. You are not required to obtain permission to reuse this article.
Licence URL(s): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Files in This Item:
File Description SizeFormat 
1-s2.0-S0028393222002111-main.pdfFulltext - Published Version4.91 MBAdobe PDFView/Open



This item is protected by original copyright



A file in this item is licensed under a Creative Commons License Creative Commons

Items in the Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

The metadata of the records in the Repository are available under the CC0 public domain dedication: No Rights Reserved https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

If you believe that any material held in STORRE infringes copyright, please contact library@stir.ac.uk providing details and we will remove the Work from public display in STORRE and investigate your claim.