Graduation Year

2025

Date of Submission

4-2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Neuroscience

Reader 1

Alison Harris

Reader 2

Catherine Reed

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

From social situations to competitive sports, humans move their bodies in distinct ways to accomplish specific goals. Research suggests that this motor expertise may influence how we view others’ movements as well, with highly trained dancers and athletes showing increased brain activity in sensorimotor circuits when observing movements from their specific motor repertoires. These results are consistent with action simulation theory, the idea that we understand others’ mental states by internally recreating their movements with our own sensorimotor systems. Supporting this idea, electroencephalography (EEG) of the mu rhythm, a brain oscillation over sensorimotor cortex between 10 and 12 Hz, shows reductions both when executing one’s own movements and observing the actions of others. However, the combined effects of action familiarity and motor expertise on the mu rhythm have not been previously explored. Here we examined mu suppression during the observation of movements that varied in action familiarity (Own vs. Other) in participants median split by self-reported athletic and/or dance experience (High vs. Low). Participants (N = 36) completed two separate sessions in which their movements were digitized using motion capture and their brain activity to the resulting animations recorded with 128-channel EEG. Mu suppression was measured between 10 and 12 Hz for sensors of interest defined by a motor execution task (bimanual finger tapping) in a separate sample. Contrary to our predictions, we found no significant differences in mu suppression to own vs. other movements between individuals reporting high (median years = 13.6 ± 1.98) versus low motor expertise (median years = 2.33 ± 2.79), in part due to limited statistical power due to the small sample size of this study. While further data should be collected to enhance statistical power, these results suggest that enhanced action simulation in individuals with expertise may be limited to highly trained movements.

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