Search results for "mirror-neuron system"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Encoding of human action in Broca's area.
2009
International audience; Broca's area has been considered, for over a century, as the brain centre responsible for speech production. Modern neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence have suggested a wider functional role is played by this area. In addition to the evidence that it is involved in syntactical analysis, mathematical calculation and music processing, it has recently been shown that Broca's area may play some role in language comprehension and, more generally, in understanding actions of other individuals. As shown by functional magnetic resonance imaging, Broca's area is one of the cortical areas activated by hand/mouth action observation and it has been proposed that it may …
Does the brain know who is at the origin of what in an imitative interaction?
2012
International audience; Brain correlates of the sense of agency have recently received increased attention. However, the explorations remain largely restricted to the study of brains in isolation. The prototypical paradigm used so far consists of manipulating visual perception of own action while asking the subject to draw a distinction between self- versus externally caused action. However, the recent definition of agency as a multifactorial phenomenon combining bottom-up and top-down processes suggests the exploration of more complex situations. Notably there is a need of accounting for the dynamics of agency in a two-body context where we often experience the double faceted question of w…
Naturalistic music and dance: Cortical phase synchrony in musicians and dancers
2018
Expertise in music has been investigated for decades and the results have been applied not only in composition, performance and music education, but also in understanding brain plasticity in a larger context. Several studies have revealed a strong connection between auditory and motor processes and listening to and performing music, and music imagination. Recently, as a logical next step in music and movement, the cognitive and affective neuro-sciences have been directed towards expertise in dance. To understand the versatile and overlapping processes during artistic stimuli, such as music and dance, it is necessary to study them with continuous naturalistic stimuli. Thus, we used long exce…
Training the Motor Cortex by Observing the Actions of Others During Immobilization
2014
International audience; Limb immobilization and nonuse are well-known causes of corticomotor depression. While physical training can drive the recovery from nonuse-dependent corticomotor effects, it remains unclear if it is possible to gain access to motor cortex in alternative ways, such as through motor imagery (MI) or action observation (AO). Transcranial magnetic stimulation was used to study the excitability of the hand left motor cortex in normal subjects immediately before and after 10 h of right arm immobilization. During immobilization, subjects were requested either to imagine to act with their constrained limb or to observe hand actions performed by other individuals. A third gro…