Action recognition is fundamental to navigating the social world. Yet, the neural basis of action recognition, specifically the roles of lateral occipitotemporal, parietal, and frontal brain regions in action recognition, is still a matter of debate. In my talk I will present recent contributions that address the following questions: Which brain regions form a pathway from perceptual to conceptual action representation, and how is action knowledge topographically organized relative to object knowledge? How selective are regions of the "action observation network" for action recognition – what are the neural differences and similarities in representing actions (e.g. a person jumping over chair) and structurally similar object events (e.g. a ball bouncing over a chair)? Finally, I present a dynamic extension to MEG-based representational similarity analysis that uses temporally variable models to investigate the representational dynamics during action recognition, including predictive representations that capture future moments of unfolding actions.
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