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Multiple Frames of Reference Are Used During the Selection and Planning of a Sequential Joint Action.

ABSTRACT: Co-actors need to anticipate each other's actions to successfully perform joint actions. The frames of reference (FOR) used to simulate a co-actor's action could impact what information is anticipated. We hypothesized that co-actor's would adopt their co-actor's body-centered FOR, even when they do not share the same spatial orientation, so that they could anticipate body-related aspects of their co-actor's task. Because it might be beneficial to plan joint actions based on environment and body-centered information, we hypothesized that individuals would utilize multiple FORs during response planning. To test these hypotheses, participants performed a sequential aiming task where the goal was to move a wooden dowel to one of four potential targets as quickly and accurately as possible. A cue was presented at the beginning of each trial that was either 25, 50, or 75% valid. Following the cue presentation, the first person to act (initiator) placed the wooden dowel, anywhere they liked, in the workspace. Then, the finisher performed their aiming movement from the location that the initiator had placed the dowel. The key dependent measure was the dowel placement of the initiator because it provided an index of how much the initiator attempted to facilitate the efficient performance of the finisher. The results revealed that individuals adopted an allocentric FOR (dowel placement was more biased toward cued locations as cue validity increased) and partially adopted their co-actor's body-centered FOR (dowel placement was biased toward the finisher's body, but not toward the co-actor's contralateral space). In conclusion, multiple FORs can be used to anticipate both body- and environment-related information of a co-actor's task. It may be difficult, however, for individuals to fully adopt their co-actor's body-centered FOR when they have differing orientations.

SUBMITTER: Ray M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5938383 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Multiple Frames of Reference Are Used During the Selection and Planning of a Sequential Joint Action.

Ray Matthew M Welsh Timothy N TN

Frontiers in psychology 20180501

Co-actors need to anticipate each other's actions to successfully perform joint actions. The frames of reference (FOR) used to simulate a co-actor's action could impact what information is anticipated. We hypothesized that co-actor's would adopt their co-actor's body-centered FOR, even when they do not share the same spatial orientation, so that they could anticipate body-related aspects of their co-actor's task. Because it might be beneficial to plan joint actions based on environment and body- ...[more]

PMID: 29765341

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Project description:Primates rely predominantly on vision to gather information from the environment and neurons representing visual space and gaze position are found in many brain areas. Within the medial temporal lobe, a brain region critical for memory, neurons in the entorhinal cortex of macaque monkeys exhibit spatial selectivity for gaze position. Specifically, the firing rate of single neurons reflects fixation location within a visual image (Killian et al., 2012). In the rodents, entorhinal cells such as grid cells, border cells, and head direction cells show spatial representations aligned to visual environmental features instead of the body (Hafting et al., 2005; Sargolini et al., 2006; Solstad et al., 2008; Diehl et al., 2017). However, it is not known whether similar allocentric representations exist in primate entorhinal cortex. Here, we recorded neural activity in the entorhinal cortex in two male rhesus monkeys during a naturalistic, free-viewing task. Our data reveal that a majority of entorhinal neurons represent gaze position and that simultaneously recorded neurons represent gaze position relative to distinct spatial reference frames, with some neurons aligned to the visual image and others aligned to the monkey's head position. Our results also show that entorhinal neural activity can be used to predict gaze position with a high degree of accuracy. These findings demonstrate that visuospatial representation is a fundamental property of entorhinal neurons in primates and suggest that entorhinal cortex may support relational memory and motor planning by coding attentional locus in distinct, behaviorally relevant frames of reference.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The entorhinal cortex, a brain area important for memory, shows striking spatial activity in rodents through grid cells, border cells, head direction cells, and nongrid spatial cells. The majority of entorhinal neurons signal the location of a rodent relative to visual environmental cues, representing the location of the animal relative to space in the world instead of the body. Recently, we found that entorhinal neurons can signal location of gaze while a monkey explores images visually. Here, we report that spatial entorhinal neurons are widespread in the monkey and these neurons are capable of showing a world-based spatial reference frame locked to the bounds of explored images. These results help connect the extensive findings in rodents to the primate.

Dataset Information

Multiple Frames of Reference Are Used During the Selection and Planning of a Sequential Joint Action.

Publications

Multiple Frames of Reference Are Used During the Selection and Planning of a Sequential Joint Action.

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