Modeling of Visuospatial Perspectives Processing and Modulation of the Fronto-Parietal Network Activity during Action Imitation

It has been suggested that the human mirror neuron system (MNS) plays a critical role in action observation and imitation. However, the transformation of perspective between the observed (allocentric) and the imitated (egocentric) actions has received little attention. We expand a previously proposed biologically plausible MNS model by incorporating general spatial transformation capabilities that are assumed to be encoded by the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the superior parietal lobule (SPL) as well as investigating their interactions with the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule. The results reveal that the IPS/SPL could process the frame of reference and the viewpoint transformations, and provide invariant visual representations for the temporo-parieto-frontal circuit. This allows the imitator to imitate the action performed by a demonstrator under various perspectives while replicating results from the literatures. Our results confirm and extend the importance of perspective transformation processing during action observation and imitation.