Invited talk: Dr. Christine ASSAIANTE, LNC, UMR 7291, AMU-CNRS, Marseille

When:
2019-09-20 at 14:00

Where:
Conference Room UCL R+0

Details:

TITLE:
The internal body representation in a developing brain: a perception-action coupling approach

ABSTRACT:
To perceive and act in its environment, the individual’s body and its interactions with the environment are represented in the brain. The precise knowledge about how our body is involved in action allows us to act or to interact with our social and non-social environment. At the cerebral level, this knowledge is stored in an internal representation labelled the body schema (BS). The BS is built through ontogenesis and is constantly updated using a functional perception-action coupling. The main function of the body schema is to contribute to action execution, action understanding and also social interactions thanks to the functional link between perception and action. While vision plays a crucial role in motor control, mainly in sensitive periods of development such as, childhood, adolescence and elderly, proprioception that encompasses the perception of positional changes and movements of body parts appears to be the most essential sensory modality to build and to update the BS. BS must be updated during development due to many factors such as morphological changes, acquisition of motor skills, and cognitive practice. The aim of our studies was to highlight the building of the BS through childhood (7-12 years old) and adolescence (13-17 years old) by exploring through proprioceptive integration the maturation of its cerebral basis and its link with behavioural improvement during development. To this end, brain imaging and behavioural performance requiring proprioceptive information were associated to explore the different processes (i.e. perception-action coupling, sensory integration) leading to the elaboration and to the update of an internal body representation in a developing brain. Our results reveal that the neural basis subtending the BS was already well established as early as the age of 7, although still immature in some aspects. This included a lower level of somatosensory and posterior parietal regions activation, and the exclusive activation of the frontopolar cortex in children compared to adults. We also found that proprioceptive network is still undergoing refinement during adolescence, including a shift from diffuse to focal Functional Connectivity (FC) and a decreased FC strength. This developmental effect was particularly pronounced for frontostriatal connections. Furthermore, changes in FC features continued beyond adolescence, although to a much lower extent. Altogether, these findings support the slow maturation of the proprioceptive integration and point to a protracted developmental time course for the BS network, which breaks with the relatively early functional maturation often associated with sensorimotor networks. Because, generate predictions about behavior and its sensorimotor consequences is a central pillar for achieving appropriate actions and motor learning, it will be relevant to develop an assessment tool for evaluating the quality of BS during the various periods of typical and atypical development.