Goal-directed actions transiently depend on dorsal hippocampus

Goal-directed actions

Newborns' preference for goal-directed actions.

The central role of sensory-motor representations in cognitive functions is almost universally accepted. However, determining the link between motor execution and its sensory counterpart and when, during ontogenesis, this link originates are still under investigation. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether at birth this link is already present and 2-day-old newborns are able to ...

Visual Adaptation to Goal-directed Hand Actions

Prolonged exposure to visual stimuli, or adaptation, often results in an adaptation "aftereffect" which can profoundly distort our perception of subsequent visual stimuli. This technique has been commonly used to investigate mechanisms underlying our perception of simple visual stimuli, and more recently, of static faces. We tested whether humans would adapt to movies of hands grasping and plac...

Anterior hippocampus and goal-directed spatial decision making.

Planning spatial paths through our environment is an important part of everyday life and is supported by a neural system including the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Here we investigated the precise functional roles of the components of this system in humans by using fMRI as participants performed a simple goal-directed route-planning task. Participants had to choose the shorter of two rout...

Do Domestic Dogs Understand Human Actions as Goal-Directed?

Understanding of other's actions as goal-directed is considered a fundamental ability underlying cognitive and social development in human infants. A number of studies using the habituation-dishabituation paradigm have shown that the ability to discern intentional relations, in terms of goal-directedness of an action towards an object, appears around 5 months of age. The question of whether non...