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Dance Training Shapes Action Perception and Its Neural Implementation within the Young and Older Adult Brain

Kirsch, LP; Diersch, N; Sumanapala, DK; Cross, ES; (2018) Dance Training Shapes Action Perception and Its Neural Implementation within the Young and Older Adult Brain. Neural Plasticity , 2018 , Article 5459106. 10.1155/2018/5459106. Green open access

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Abstract

How we perceive others in action is shaped by our prior experience. Many factors influence brain responses when observing others in action, including training in a particular physical skill, such as sport or dance, and also general development and aging processes. Here, we investigate how learning a complex motor skill shapes neural and behavioural responses among a dance-naïve sample of 20 young and 19 older adults. Across four days, participants physically rehearsed one set of dance sequences, observed a second set, and a third set remained untrained. Functional MRI was obtained prior to and immediately following training. Participants’ behavioural performance on motor and visual tasks improved across the training period, with younger adults showing steeper performance gains than older adults. At the brain level, both age groups demonstrated decreased sensorimotor cortical engagement after physical training, with younger adults showing more pronounced decreases in inferior parietal activity compared to older adults. Neural decoding results demonstrate that among both age groups, visual and motor regions contain experience-specific representations of new motor learning. By combining behavioural measures of performance with univariate and multivariate measures of brain activity, we can start to build a more complete picture of age-related changes in experience-dependent plasticity.

Type: Article
Title: Dance Training Shapes Action Perception and Its Neural Implementation within the Young and Older Adult Brain
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1155/2018/5459106
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/5459106
Language: English
Additional information: © 2018 Louise P. Kirsch et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10052340
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