Presentation

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Linking movement and cognition through the hierarchical buildup of internal modeling.

Poster B115 in Poster Session B, Tuesday, October 24, 3:30 - 5:15 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port

Lydia DOROKHOVA¹, Kep Kee Loh², Jean-Luc Anton¹, Julien Sein¹, Bruno Nazarian¹, Pascal Belin¹, Runnqvist Elin¹; ¹Aix Marseille Université, ²McGill University

Movement and cognition have traditionally been investigated separately, hypothesized to rely on different mechanisms. More recently, networks of simpler motor reflexes have been proposed as precursors of more complex cognitive functions (Friston, 2011; Pezzulo et al., 2021). In particular, there are theories that propose recycling motor control processes for cognitive processing, such as predictive coding orinternal modeling (Ito, 2008). While the brain loci network associated with the control of movement is known to include the cerebellum and primary sensory and motor cortex, the hierarchical buildup of internal modeling would suppose a shift towards more prefrontal and parieto-temporal regions. In this study we were interested in observing this shift within individuals. We acquired the fMRI data of 20 participants performing recurrent movements of different body parts (tongue and hand) with two conditions: movement alone and monitored movement. In the movement alone condition participants were instructed to perform specific and paced movements with either the hand or the tongue. In the monitored movement condition, they received the additional instruction not to touch the bed of the fMRI or the walls of their mouth. The monitored movement condition was used to maximize the cognitive involvement in the task. Finally, in a baseline condition, participants were instructed not to move while looking at the same fixation cross as in the other conditions. Averaging activations of mouth and hand movements served to investigate movement monitoring control that generalizes across body parts. Examining activations of hand and mouth separately served to explore precursors of gestural and verbal motor acts respectively. The data was analysed using factorial GLM contrasting movement alone and monitored movement with the baseline fixation both across hand and tongue and for each body part separately. To investigate commonalities across the contrasts of movement alone (MV) and monitored movement (MN) we subsequently masked the MV contrast inclusively with the MN contrast. Similarly, to investigate specificities of each contrast, we masked MN exclusively with MV, and MV exclusively with MN. The results revealed that both movement and monitored movement conditions activate a network of primary motor, parietal and cerebellar regions. Additionally, the exclusive masking procedure revealed additional activations for more prefrontal regions such as BA10, BA9, BA8 and BA45 for monitored movement. These findings are consistent with the hierarchical shift proposed by models of internal modeling and support the hypothesis that the mechanism may have emerged gradually during evolution. Interestingly, mouth monitored movement loci were mostly found left-lateralised, while right-hand monitored movement activations were found bilateral. In contrast, movement alone resulted in more bilateral activations for the tongue and, not surprisingly, in left lateralized activations for right hand movement.

Topic Areas: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes, Speech Motor Control