Post by Deborah Joye

What's the science?

An important foundation of acquiring new skills is the ability to learn by watching others. But how does the brain connect what we see to our own motor movements? When we learn a new skill through physical practice, activity patterns in our frontoparietal brain regions become more precise and coordinated – encoding a specific representation of the activity we are learning. These brain regions include the pre-motor and sensorimotor cortices, which are responsible for planning and executing movements. Can these changes in brain activity occur when learning something just by watching someone else move? This week in Journal of Neuroscience, Apšvalka and colleagues use functional imaging to demonstrate that observational training results in brain activity changes similar to those caused by physical practice.

How did they do it?

Sixteen right-handed male and female participants (ages 20-40) were asked to learn a key-press task by watching videos of the task being performed by someone else. Participants completed a pre- and post-training functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session to visualize their brain activity while they watched the videos, as well as pre- and post-training sessions in which they performed the task themselves. For 4 days between these two fMRI sessions, participants completed the observational training where they learned key-press sequences by watching videos and reporting any errors made. The authors analyzed fMRI data (using conventional univariate fMRI analyses) before versus after training to determine whether observed key-press sequences were represented by patterns of activity in the frontoparietal cortex. During fMRI and testing sessions pre- and post-training, participants were shown sequences they also saw during observational training, as well as sequences they did not see. The authors could, therefore, analyse whether sequence-specific brain activation was stronger for sequences that participants had been trained on (versus those they had not). They then analyzed frontoparietal cortex activity, using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) which evaluates how activity patterns across a population of voxels (like 3D pixels in a brain image) change over time. This analysis provides a more nuanced investigation of activity changes in a particular brain region because it considers patterns of activation at each voxel, rather than for a region as a whole, capturing information that could be lost with conventional fMRI analysis.