HOW SIMILAR ARE THE NEURAL PATTERNS WHEN OBSERVING GRASPING HAND POSTURES TO THE BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS WHEN EXECUTING THE GRASP?

It is well-known that human neural representations of grasping movement observation and execution share similarities. However, it remains unclear to what extent neural patterns of movement observation relate with behavioral covariates of the movement, such as muscle or kinematic activity, or with categorical models that describe hand posture or object properties. In this study, we explored the relation between EEG neural representation of observing a large variety of hand-object interaction images and two representations of the observed movement’s execution: the behavioral covariates and categorical models. We found that the EEG representation of the observation phase was correlated with the muscle representation during the execution most strongly in the movement holding phase. Furthermore, we found similarities with the categorical model that reflects the shape and the size of the object. With these findings we gain a joint understanding of the relation between movement observation and execution and a mean to facilitate an intuitive control of neuroprostheses in motor impaired individuals.