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Driving principles of socio-economical decision making and their neural bases: the case of the Ultimatum Game
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Implicit and explicit processing of motor and non-motor verbs and the role the primary motor cortex (M1)
No full textNeuropsychological perspectives on the mechanisms of imitation
No full textCognitive neuroscientists have contributed to the understanding of imitation according to their
expertise. Neuropsychologists first established over a century ago that lesions to the left hemisphere
of right-handed individuals lead to a dramatic reduction of their ability to imitate gestures. In
contrast, after frontal lobe damage, patients may experience severe difficulties in inhibiting their imitative
tendency. These findings suggested that our tendency to imitate is mostly sustained by the left
hemisphere and that we normally manage successfully to keep it under control. Neuropsychologists
went on investigating other aspects of gesture imitation. These include the existence of putative
mechanisms involved in imitating different types of gestures (e.g. meaningful and meaningless or
transitive and intransitive), the strategic control over these mechanisms and whether there are differences
in imitation depending on the action goal or the body part used. Based on neuropsychological
findings, some cognitive models of gesture imitation have been forwarded, the most influential of
which will be reviewed here. In particular, reference will be made to the dual route model and to
accounts that associate the imitative deficit to putative degraded body representations
The role of volleyball expertise in motor simulation
No full textWe explored the impact of motor experience on the interaction between implicit motor simulation and language-processing. In an action familiarity judgment task, expert volleyball players, fans and novices were presented with semantically correct sentences describing possible and not possible motor actions, all as negative or positive contexts, e.g., "Don't shank!" or "Assist!". As processing negated action-phrases is known to reduce simulation states, exposure to negative or positive contexts was used here to test how simulation varies according to motor feasibility (possible, impossible) and experience (experts and fans). A significant group×stimulus×context interaction showed that athletes and fans, took longer to process negative than positive contexts for possible actions, compared to action-impossible sentences. In addition, experts were significantly faster and more accurate than fans and, in turn, they were both more accurate than novices. Thus, implicit motor simulation impacts on action-verb processing depending on (i) the domain-relevant expertise, (ii) the feasibility of the actions, and (iii) on whether scenes are presented in a negated context. These results suggest that the implicit triggering of motor representations is modulated by the context and it is tuned to people's motor repertoire, even when actions are described linguistically. © 2011 Elsevier B.V
How are the motor system activity and functional connectivity between the cognitive and sensorimotor systems modulated by athletic expertise?
No full textExpertise offers a unique insight into how our brain functions. The purpose of this experiment was to determine if motor system activity and functional connectivity between the cognitive system and sensorimotor system is differentially modulated by an individual's level of expertise. This goal was achieved through the acquisition of functional neuroimaging data in 10 expert volleyball players and 10 novice individuals who were presented with a series of sentences describing possible technical volleyball-specific motor acts and acts that cannot be performed as positive ("Do …!") or negative ("Don't …") commands, while they were silently reading them and deciding whether the actions were technically feasible or not. Compared with novices, experts' activity in the left primary motor cortex hand area (M1) and in the left premotor cortex (Pm) was decreased by impossible actions presented as positive commands. Sensorimotor activation in response to action-related stimuli is not that automatic as held since we found that these areas were deactivated during the task, and their functional connectivity to the primary visual cortex was strengthened for possible actions presented as positive commands, reflecting the neural processes underlying the interaction between motor and visual imagery. These results suggest that the neural activity within the key areas implicitly triggered by motor simulation is a function of the expertise, action feasibility, and context. © 2013 Elsevier B.V
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