S1-4: Experience Dependent Differences in Brain Mechanisms of Action Observation: From Watching Dance to CCTV Surveillance

Our recent work has focused on using fMRI to investigate how experience in observing action is reflected in brain activity. In this talk I will concentrate on two studies that span a range of experience. The first study investigates brain activity of inexperienced observers when they view a complex 6-minute dance to which they have no familiarity. Comparison of brain activity to both a novel motion index and a measure of human event segmentation revealed a right hemisphere system including the inferior frontal gyrus and occipitotemporal cortex. This neural system can be interpreted as providing an ability to use motion and information about action hierarchies to parse unfamiliar streams of human activity. The second study contrasts the brain activity of naive observers to experienced CCTV operators when they view selected video clips of real street activity while predicting whether physical violence ensues after completion of the video clip. Comparison of the brain activity between groups revealed a decrease of activity in the parahippocampal gyrus for the experienced CCTV operators. These results, consistent with our previous finding with experienced drummers (Petrini et al., 2011), suggest improved neural efficiency for experienced observers in the representation of familiar actions