Functional magnetic resonance imaging connectivity analyses reveal efference-copy to primary somatosensory area, BA2.

Some theories of motor control suggest efference-copies of motor commands reach somatosensory cortices. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test these models. We varied the amount of efference-copy signal by making participants squeeze a soft material either actively or passively. We found electromyographical recordings, an efference-copy proxy, to predict activity in primary somatosensory regions, in particular Brodmann Area (BA) 2. Partial correlation analyses confirmed that brain activity in cortical structures associated with motor control (premotor and supplementary motor cortices, the parietal area PF and the cerebellum) predicts brain activity in BA2 without being entirely mediated by activity in early somatosensory (BA3b) cortex. Our study therefore provides valuable empirical evidence for efference-copy models of motor control, and shows that signals in BA2 can indeed reflect an input from motor cortices and suggests that we should interpret activations in BA2 as evidence for somatosensory-motor rather than somatosensory coding alone.

µ-suppression during action observation and execution correlates with BOLD in dorsal premotor, inferior parietal, and SI cortices.

The discovery of mirror neurons in the monkey, that fire during both the execution and the observation of the same action, sparked great interest in studying the human equivalent. For over a decade, both functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) have been used to quantify activity in the human mirror neuron system (MNS)-yet, little is still known about how fMRI and EEG measures of the MNS relate to each other. To test the frequent assumption that regions of the MNS as evidenced by fMRI are the origin of the suppression of the EEG µ-rhythm during both action execution and observation, we recorded EEG and BOLD-fMRI signals simultaneously while participants observed and executed actions. We found that the suppression of the µ-rhythm in EEG covaried with BOLD activity in typical MNS regions, inferior parietal lobe (IPL), dorsal premotor (dPM) and primary somatosensory cortex (BA2), during both action observation and execution. In contrast, in BA44, only nonoverlapping voxels correlated with µ-suppression during observation and execution. These findings provide direct support for the notion that µ-suppression is a valid indicator of MNS activity in BA2, IPL, and dPM, but argues against the idea that mirror neurons in BA44 are the prime source of µ-suppression. These results shed light on the neural basis of µ-suppression and provide a basis for integrating more closely the flourishing but often separate literatures on the MNS using fMRI and EEG.