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Brain Advance Access originally published online on July 26, 2007
Brain 2007 130(9):2452-2461; doi:10.1093/brain/awm162
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Superior temporal and premotor brain areas necessary for biological motion perception

Ayse Pinar Saygin1,2

1Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK and 2Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Correspondence to: Dr Ayse Pinar Saygin, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK E-mail: a.saygin{at}fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk

We tested biological motion perception in a large group of unilateral stroke patients (N = 60). Both right and left hemisphere lesioned patients were significantly impaired compared with age-matched controls. Voxel-based lesion analyses revealed that lesions in superior temporal and premotor frontal areas had the greatest effect on biological motion perception. Moreover, the effect in each region was independent, and not attributable to indirect effects of lesions in the other area. When we explored functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected from neurologically healthy controls in a separate experiment in relation to the lesion maps, we found that the two methods converged on their findings. We thus establish that superior temporal and premotor areas are not only involved in biological motion perception, but also have causal relationships to deficits in biological motion perception. While the precise functional roles of each region remain to be identified, this network has been implicated in the perception of action stimuli in many studies and as such patients’ deficits may reflect an inability to effectively engage the action observation system.

Key Words: biological motion; lesion mapping; fMRI; premotor cortex; STS

Abbreviations: 2AFC, 2-alternative-forced-choice; ANCOVAs, analyses of covariance; CT, computerized tomography; CVA, cerebrovascular accident; fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging; LHD, left-hemisphere damage; MNI, Montreal Neurological Institute; MRI, magnetic resonance imaging; pSTG, posterior superior temporal gyrus; pSTS, posterior superior temporal sulcus; RHD, right-hemisphere damage; TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation; VSLM, voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping; FHWM, full width at half maximum.

Received May 18, 2007. Revised June 16, 2007. Accepted June 22, 2007.


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