How do we recognize other people’s actions? What does it mean to open something (e.g. a box, your mouth, or your mind)?

The Action Recognition and Concepts Group at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC, University of Trento, Italy) elucidates the neural pathway of action recognition and understanding – from the perception of single entities (e.g. body parts, objects) and their movements in space to more general, conceptual representations that capture, for example, what open a box and open your mind have in common.

A key aspect of this research focuses on how different aspects of action knowledge are topographically organized on the cortical surface and what determines this topography. Thereby, we seek to improve our understanding of the principles of knowledge organization in the brain. 

We address these questions using neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, MEG, often in combination with multivariate pattern classification and RSA) in typical and special populations.