Neural theory for the visual recognition of goal-directed actions M Giese1, F Fleischer1, V Caggiano2, J Pomper3, P Thier3 |
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1Section for Computational Sensomotorics, University Tübingen; Dept. for Cognitive Neurology, HIH and CIN, University Clinic Tübingen, Germany |
| The visual recognition of biological movements and actions is a centrally important visual function, involving complex computational processes that link neural representations for action perception and execution. This fact has made this topic highly attractive for researchers in cognitive neuroscience, and a broad spectrum of partially highly speculative theories have been proposed about the computational processes that might underlie action vision in primate cortex. Additional work has associated underlying principles with a wide range of other brain functions, such as social cognition, emotions, or the interpretation of causal events. In spite of this very active discussion about hypothetical computational and conceptual theories, our detailed knowledge about the underlying neural processes is quite limited, and a broad spectrum of critical experiments that narrow down the relevant computational key steps remain yet to be done. We will present a physiologically-inspired neural theory for the processing of goal-directed actions, which provides a unifying account for existing neurophysiological results on the visual recognition of hand actions in monkey cortex. At the same time, we will present new experimental results from the Tübingen group. These experiments were partly motivated by testing aspects of the proposed neural theory. Partly they confirm aspects of this theory, and partly they point to substantial limitations, helping to develop more comprehensive neural accounts for the computational processes that underlie visual action recognition in primate cortex. Importantly, our model accounts for many basic properties of cortical action-selective neurons by simple physiologically plausible mechanisms that are known from visual shape and motion processing, without necessitating a central computational role of motor representations. We demonstrate that the same model also provides an account for experiments on the visual perception of causality, suggesting that simple forms of causality perception might be a side effect of computational processes that mainly subserve the recognition of goal-directed actions. Supported by the DFG, BMBF, and EU FP7 projects TANGO, AMARSI, and ABC. |
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