| old_uid | 6926 |
|---|---|
| title | séance reportée |
| start_date | 2009/05/14 |
| schedule | 16h |
| online | no |
| summary | The ability to discriminate and understand the goals of others’ actions constitutes one of the core elements of social cognition. The aim of my PhD dissertation was to explore, in a phylogenic perspective, how goal-directed actions are coded in the brain and to which extent they are understood when observed in others. This dissertation is therefore constituted of two experiments using different methods: in the first one, we recorded motor and visuo-motor neurons from the primary motor and the ventral premotor areas of macaque monkeys while they grasped food with their hand or by means of pliers that allowed to dissociate the goal of grasping from the movement required to achieve it. The second experiment was modeled on experimental methods used in developmental psychology, to explore whether macaque monkeys, like preverbal babies (Gergely et al., 1995) rely on a principle of rationality when evaluating a goal-directed action. Our electrophysiological data showed that in the ventral premotor cortex, neurons code the goal of an action independently of the means or the sequence of movements necessary to realize it. These results show that in the motor system the cortical representation of action is organized in terms of its goal, shedding further light on the neural bases underpinning the execution of equifinal actions (Umiltà et al., 2008, PNAS). Our behavioral data demonstrated that like 9-months-old babies, macaque monkeys show a sensibility to the functional adequacy between means and end in a certain context, but that ¬– differently from humans – this sensibility is limited to biological actions directed to a goal that has become familiar through experience (Rochat et al., 2008, Curr. Biol.). All together, these results shed light on the existence of a neural mechanism, common among primates enabling action understanding through the direct coding of its goal. In humans, this system could, however, have reached a higher level of abstraction, which would explain our cognitive flexibility allowing both goal understanding of unfamiliar actions or agents and imitation of a new behavior leading to a specific goal. |
| oncancel | séance reportée |
| responsibles | Farnè, Béranger, Soulier |