Where does your own action influence your perception of another person's action in the brain?

Activation of premotor cortex during the observation and imitation of human actions is now increasingly accepted, but it remains unclear how the CNS is able to resolve potential conflicts between the observation of another person's action and the ongoing control of one's own action. Recent data suggest that this overlap leads to a systematic bias, where lifting a box influences participant's perceptual judgments of the weight of a box lifted by another person. We now investigate the neural basis of this bias effect using fMRI. Seventeen participants performed a perceptual weight judgment task or two control conditions while lifting a light box, a heavy box or no box during scanning. Brain regions related to perceptual bias were localized by correlating individual differences in bias with BOLD signal. Five regions were found to show correlations with psychophysical bias: left inferior frontal gyrus, left central sulcus, left extrastriate body area, left lingual gyrus and right intraparietal sulcus. The cluster in primary motor cortex was also activated by box lifting, and the cluster in extrastriate body area by the observation of hand actions and the weight judgment task. We suggest that these brain areas are part of a network where motor processing modulates perceptual judgment of observed human actions, and thus visual and motor processes cannot be thought of as two distinct systems, but instead interact at many levels. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.