Dorsal premotor cortex is related to recognition of verbal and visual descriptions of actions in the first-person perspective

This fMRI study examined whether the perspective difference of a verbally and visually descripted action stimulus (i.e., sentence and picture) modulates activity in the motor-related area. The participants were presented with a sentence (e.g., “I grasp an apple” or “You grasp an apple”) or a picture (e.g., a picture of grasping an apple in which a right hand appears from the bottom or from the top) as the experimental task. A full factorial analysis of variance model with stimulus modality (verbal vs. visual description) and perspective (first- vs. second-person perspective) was used. The fMRI results showed greater activity in the left dorsal premotor cortex in the first-person perspective than in the second-person perspective for both the verbal and visual descriptions. The results suggest that motor representation is more strongly recruited with the recognition of an action-related stimulus descripted in the first-person perspective than in the second-person perspective, independent of stimulus modality.