title: Perceiving the unusual: temporal properties of hierarchical motor representations for action perception.
abstract: Recent computational approaches to action imitation have advocated the use of hierarchical representations in the perception and imitation of demonstrated actions. Hierarchical representations present several advantages, with the main one being their ability to process information at multiple levels of detail. However, the nature of the hierarchies in these approaches has remained relatively unsophisticated, and their relation with biological evidence has not been investigated in detail, in particular with respect to the timing of movements. Following recent neuroscience work on the modulation of the premotor mirror neuron activity during the observation of unpredictable grasping movements, we present here an implementation of our HAMMER architecture using the minimum variance model for implementing reaching and grasping movements that have biologically plausible trajectories. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance of our model in matching the temporal dynamics of the modulation of cortical excitability during the passive observation of normal and unpredictable movements of human demonstrators.
authors.affiliation: Biologically Inspired Autonomous Robots Team (BioART), Intelligent Systems and Networks Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2BT, UK. y.demiris@imperial.ac.uk
authors.forename: Yiannis
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Demiris
authors.forename: Gavin
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Simmons
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D018737:Hand Strength / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors