Understanding the world around us requires categorization. Whereas there exists a rich literature regarding the principles involved in the perception and recognition of objects, the scientific community is only beginning to ask similar questions in the domain of actions. The current project aims to fill this gap by examining the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying the representation of observed real-world actions. In the first part of the project, I aim to determine which brain areas capture the different hierarchical stages of a proposed taxonomy of actions, and how action representations at three different levels of the hierarchy evolve in time. In the second part of the project, I aim to determine how different action components identified in previous studies evolve in space and time. The project foresees a combination of behavioural, fMRI and EEG data, using time-resolved representational similarity analysis, multivariate pattern analysis and time generalization. In contrast to conventional methods that focus on static action representations, this approach allows the examination of the spatiotemporal dynamics of different processing stages underlying action representations. The proposed studies potentially provide novel insights into key organizing principles of the brain that are likely going beyond the domain of human action representations. Moreover, the studies are expected to generate testable hypotheses for future studies, and to provide important constraints for psychologically and biologically plausible computational models of action recognition.
