Activity in Occipito-Temporal Cortex Is Involved in Tool-Use Planning and Contributes to Tool-Related Semantic Neural Representations.

Tool use and language are highly refined human abilities which may show neural commonalities due to their potential reciprocal interaction during evolution. Recent work provided evidence for shared neural resources between tool use and syntax. However, whether activity within the tool-use network also contributes to semantic neural representations of tool nouns remains untested.

Eyes and hand are both reliable at localizing somatosensory targets.

Body representations (BR) for action are critical to perform accurate movements. Yet, behavioral measures suggest that BR are distorted even in healthy people. However, the upper limb has mostly been used as a probe so far, making difficult to decide whether BR are truly distorted or whether this depends on the effector used as a readout.

Saccades to both vision and touch are modified following adaptation but cross-modal transfers are asymmetrical.

Adaptation of reactive saccades (RS), made toward the sudden appearance of stimuli in our environment, is a plastic mechanism thought to occur at the motor level of saccade generation. As saccadic oculomotor commands integrate multisensory information in the parietal cortex and superior colliculus, adaptation of RS should occur not only toward visual but also tactile targets. In addition, saccadic adaptation in one modality (vision or touch) should transfer cross-modally.

Task-independent neural bases of peer presence effect on cognition in children and adults.

There is ample behavioral evidence that others' mere presence can affect any behavior in human and non-human animals, generally facilitating the expression of mastered responses while impairing the acquisition of novel ones. Much less is known about i) how the brain orchestrates the modulation of such a wide array of behaviors by others' presence and ii) when these neural underpinnings mature during development. To address these issues, fMRI data were collected in children and adults alternately observed and unobserved by a familiar peer.