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Transient disruption of the inferior parietal lobule impairs the ability to attribute intention to action

Jean-François Patri, Andrea Cavallo, Kiri Pullar, Marco Soriano, Martina Valente, Atesh Koul, Alessio Avenanti, View ORCID ProfileStefano Panzeri, Cristina Becchio
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.047787
Jean-François Patri
1Cognition, Motion & Neuroscience, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy
2Neural Computation Laboratory, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genoa, Italy
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Andrea Cavallo
1Cognition, Motion & Neuroscience, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy
3Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
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Kiri Pullar
1Cognition, Motion & Neuroscience, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy
2Neural Computation Laboratory, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genoa, Italy
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Marco Soriano
1Cognition, Motion & Neuroscience, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy
3Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
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Martina Valente
2Neural Computation Laboratory, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genoa, Italy
4Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy
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Atesh Koul
1Cognition, Motion & Neuroscience, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy
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Alessio Avenanti
5Center for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Cesena, Italy
6Centro de Investigación en Neuropsicología y Neurociencias Cognitivas, Universidad Católica del Maule, Talca, Chile
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Stefano Panzeri
2Neural Computation Laboratory, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genoa, Italy
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  • ORCID record for Stefano Panzeri
  • For correspondence: stefano.panzeri@iit.it cristina.becchio@iit.it
Cristina Becchio
1Cognition, Motion & Neuroscience, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy
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  • For correspondence: stefano.panzeri@iit.it cristina.becchio@iit.it
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Abstract

Although it is well established that fronto-parietal regions are active during action observation, whether they play a causal role in the ability to infer others’ intentions from visual kinematics remains undetermined. In experiments reported here, we combined offline continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) with computational modeling to reveal single-trial computations in the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Participants received cTBS over the left anterior IPL and the left IFG pars orbitalis, in separate sessions, before completing an intention discrimination task (discriminate intention of observed reach-to-grasp acts) or a kinematic discrimination task (discriminate peak wrist height of the same acts) unrelated to intention. We targeted intentions-sensitive regions whose fMRI-measured activity accurately discriminated intention from the same action stimuli. We found that transient disruption of activity of the left IPL, but not the IFG, impaired the observer’s ability to judge intention from movement kinematics. Kinematic discrimination unrelated to intention, in contrast, was largely unaffected. Computational analyses revealed that IPL cTBS did not impair the ability to ‘see’ changes in movement kinematics, nor did it alter the weight given to informative versus non-informative kinematic features. Rather, it selectively impaired the ability to link variations in informative features to the correct intention. These results provide the first causal evidence that left anterior IPL maps kinematics to intentions.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted April 18, 2020.
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Transient disruption of the inferior parietal lobule impairs the ability to attribute intention to action
Jean-François Patri, Andrea Cavallo, Kiri Pullar, Marco Soriano, Martina Valente, Atesh Koul, Alessio Avenanti, Stefano Panzeri, Cristina Becchio
bioRxiv 2020.04.18.047787; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.047787
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Transient disruption of the inferior parietal lobule impairs the ability to attribute intention to action
Jean-François Patri, Andrea Cavallo, Kiri Pullar, Marco Soriano, Martina Valente, Atesh Koul, Alessio Avenanti, Stefano Panzeri, Cristina Becchio
bioRxiv 2020.04.18.047787; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.047787

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