title: Haptic contents of a movie dynamically engage the spectator's sensorimotor cortex.
abstract: Observation of another person's actions and feelings activates brain areas that support similar functions in the observer, thereby facilitating inferences about the other's mental and bodily states. In real life, events eliciting this kind of vicarious brain activations are intermingled with other complex, ever-changing stimuli in the environment. One practical approach to study the neural underpinnings of real-life vicarious perception is to image brain activity during movie viewing. Here the goal was to find out how observed haptic events in a silent movie would affect the spectator's sensorimotor cortex. The functional state of the sensorimotor cortex was monitored by analyzing, in 16 healthy subjects, magnetoencephalographic (MEG) responses to tactile finger stimuli that were presented once per second throughout the session. Using canonical correlation analysis and spatial filtering, consistent single-trial responses across subjects were uncovered, and their waveform changes throughout the movie were quantified. The long-latency (85-175 ms) parts of the responses were modulated in concordance with the participants' average moment-by-moment ratings of own engagement in the haptic content of the movie (correlation r = 0.49; ratings collected after the MEG session). The results, obtained by using novel signal-analysis approaches, demonstrate that the functional state of the human sensorimotor cortex fluctuates in a fine-grained manner even during passive observation of temporally varying haptic events. Hum Brain Mapp 37:4061-4068, 2016. © 2016 The Authors Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, and MEG Core, Aalto NeuroImaging, School of Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland. kaisu.lankinen@aalto.fi.
authors.forename: Kaisu
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lankinen
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, and MEG Core, Aalto NeuroImaging, School of Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland.
authors.forename: Eero
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Smeds
authors.affiliation: Department of Media, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, P.O. Box 16500, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland.
authors.forename: Pia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Tikka
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, and MEG Core, Aalto NeuroImaging, School of Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland.
authors.forename: Elina
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pihko
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, and MEG Core, Aalto NeuroImaging, School of Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland.|Department of Art, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, P.O. Box 31000, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland.
authors.forename: Riitta
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hari
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, and MEG Core, Aalto NeuroImaging, School of Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland.|Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 63, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Miika
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Koskinen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D005385:Fingers / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D015225:Magnetoencephalography; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D009040:Motion Pictures; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D066191:Sensorimotor Cortex / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000502:physiology*; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D055698:Touch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: canonical correlation; magnetoencephalography (MEG); movie; sensorimotor cortex; somatosensory cortex; spatial filtering; tactile perception