Abstract
The lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC) is comprised of subregions selectively activated by images of human bodies (extrastriate body area, EBA), objects (lateral occipital complex, LO), and motion (MT+). However, their role in motor imagery and movement processing is unclear, as are the influences of learning and expertise on its recruitment. The purpose of our study was to examine putative changes in LOTC activation during action processing following motor learning of novel choreography in professional ballet dancers. Subjects were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging up to four times over 34 weeks and performed four tasks: viewing and visualizing a newly learned ballet dance, visualizing a dance that was not being learned, and movement of the foot. EBA, LO, and MT+ were activated most while viewing dance compared to visualization and movement. Significant increases in activation were observed over time in left LO only during visualization of the unlearned dance, and all subregions were activated bilaterally during the viewing task after 34 weeks of performance, suggesting learning-induced plasticity. Finally, we provide novel evidence for modulation of EBA with dance experience during the motor task, with significant activation elicited in a comparison group of novice dancers only. These results provide a composite of LOTC activation during action processing of newly learned ballet choreography and movement of the foot. The role of these areas is confirmed as primarily subserving observation of complex sequences of whole-body movement, with new evidence for modification by experience and over the course of real world ballet learning.
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Notes
Due to time constraints in ongoing data collection, the EBA was functionally localized in only 12 subjects (see Supplementary Table 1). Justification for the validity of our anatomical ROIs is provided in “Signal processing: region of interest analysis”.
Separate analyses were performed for each ROI and hemisphere to account for potential functional lateralization and to increase the statistical power of our mixed model analyses.
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Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Discovery Grant to JFXD (RGPIN/346135-2012) and an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship to PMD, Faculty of Health, Parkinson Society Canada, and a generous donation from the Irpinia Club of Toronto to JFXD. Many thanks to Mr. L. Fischer of the National Ballet of Canada for his continued collaboration and the volunteers for their participation and commitment. Special thank you to Dr. S. Monaco for informing revised analyses, to M. Olshansky for preprocessing and ROI analyses, and to Dr. R. Cribbie for consultation on statistical analyses. We also thank K. Grill-Spector and K. Weiner for sharing their EBA localizer code and image database and for offering their assistance. Thank you to J. Williams, H. Tehrani, K. Petina, Dr. L. Vingilis-Jaremko, and S. Leung for data collection and to members of the DeSouza Lab (www.joeLAB.com) for reviewing the manuscript. We would also like to thank our anonymous reviewers from previous versions of the manuscript for their valuable insights and contributions to our current version.
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P.D. and J.F.X.D. conceived and wrote the manuscript; J.F.X.D. and R.J.B. were involved in experimental design and data collection; P.D. and G.R.L. conducted data analysis; P.D. and J.F.X.D. revised the manuscript.
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Di Nota, P.M., Levkov, G., Bar, R. et al. Lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC) activity is greatest while viewing dance compared to visualization and movement: learning and expertise effects. Exp Brain Res 234, 2007–2023 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4607-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4607-7