Ricerc@Sapienza

Action observation triggers imitation, a powerful mechanism permitting interpersonal coordination. Coordination, however, also occurs when the partners’ actions are nonimitative and physically incongruent. One inf luential theory postulates that this is achieved via top-down modulation of imitation exerted by prefrontal regions. Here, we rather argue that coordination depends on sharing a goal with the interacting partner: this shapes action observation, overriding involuntary imitation, through the predictive activity of the left ventral premotor cortex (lvPMc).

Discrepancies between sensory predictions and action outcome are at the base of error coding. However, these phenomena have mainly been studied focussing on individual performance. Here, we explored EEG responses to motor prediction errors during a human-avatar interaction and show that Theta/Alpha activity of the frontal error-monitoring system works in phase with activity of the occipito-temporal node of the action observation network.