Pfister, R. 1 , Melcher, T. 2 , Kiesel, A. 1 , Dechent, P. 3 & Gruber, O. 2
1 Department of Psychology III, University of Würzburg. Würzburg, Germany.
2 Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Georg-August-University Göttingen. Göttingen, Germany.
3 MR-Research in Neurology and Psychiatry, Georg-August-University Göttingen. Göttingen, Germany.
How does our mind produce physical action of our body? How are goals transformed into overt behaviour? For about 200 years, philosophers and psychologists hypothesized the transformation from mind to body to occur via the anticipation of sensory consequences of an action. And whereas there is ample evidence for this hypothesis in behavioural experiments, the neural underpinnings of action control via sensory anticipations are virtually unknown. Consequently, current neuroscientific models of action control do not account for this mechanism. Using a response-effect compatibility paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study identified the inferior parietal cortex and the parahippocampal gyrus as key regions for this type of action control. These findings set the stage for a neuroscientific framework for explaining action control by sensory anticipations and thus a potential synthesis of psychological and neuroscientific approaches to human action.