Functional synchronization in repetitive bimanual prehension movements.

To examine the mechanisms of functional bimanual synchronization in goal-directed movements, we studied the movement kinematics of motorically unimpaired subjects while they performed repetitive prehension movements (either unimanually or bimanually) to small food items. Compared to unimanual conditions, bimanual movement execution yielded a significantly prolonged mouth contact phase. We hypothesized that this threefold prolongation led to a proper functional synchronization of the movement onsets of both hands at the beginning of each new movement cycle.

Hand aperture patterns in prehension.

Although variations in the standard prehensile pattern can be found in the literature, these alternative patterns have never been studied systematically. This was the goal of the current paper. Ten participants picked up objects with a pincer grip.

The agent is right: when motor embodied cognition is space-dependent.

The role of embodied mechanisms in processing sentences endowed with a first person perspective is now widely accepted. However, whether embodied sentence processing within a third person perspective would also have motor behavioral significance remains unknown. Here, we developed a novel version of the Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) in which participants were asked to perform a movement compatible or not with the direction embedded in a sentence having a first person (Experiment 1: You gave a pizza to Louis) or third person perspective (Experiment 2: Lea gave a pizza to Louis).

Impaired visual hand recognition in preoperative patients during brachial plexus anesthesia: importance of peripheral neural input for mental representation of the hand.

Background: Perceptual illusions described in healthy subjects undergoing regional anesthesia (RA) are probably related to short-term plastic brain changes. We addressed whether performance on an implicit mental rotation task reflects these RA-induced changes in body schema brain representations. Studying these changes in healthy volunteers may shed light on normal function and the central mechanisms of pain.

Grip force is part of the semantic representation of manual action verbs.

Motor actions and action verbs activate similar cortical brain regions. A functional interference can be taken as evidence that there is a parallel treatment of these two types of information and would argue for the biological grounding of language in action. A novel approach examining the relationship between language and grip force is presented.