Previous studies showed that imitation of finger and hand/arm gestures could be differentially impaired after brain damage. However, so far, the interaction between gesture meaning and body part in imitation deficits has not been fully assessed. In the present study, we aimed at filling this gap by testing 36 unilateral left brain-damaged patients with and without apraxia (20 apraxics), and 29 healthy controls on an imitation task of either finger or hand/arm meaningful (MF) gestures and meaningless (ML) movements, using a large sample of stimuli and controlling for the composition of the experimental list. Left-brain damaged patients imitated ML finger worse than hand/arm movements, whereas they did not show the same difference in MF gesture imitation. In addition, apraxic patients imitated finger movements worse than hand/arm movements. Furthermore, apraxic patients' imitation performance was equally affected irrespective of the action meaning, whereas non-apraxic patients showed better imitation performance on MF gestures. Results suggest that MF gestures are processed as a whole, as imitation of these gestures relies on the stored motor programs in long-term memory, independently of the body part involved. In contrast, ML movements seem to be processed through direct visuo-motor transformations, with left-brain damage specifically disrupting imitation performance of the more cognitive demanding finger movements.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107720 | DOI Listing |
ACS Nano
January 2025
School of Mechanical Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China.
Natural skin receptors use ions as signal carriers, while most of the developed artificial tactile sensors utilize electrons as information carriers. To imitate the biological ionic sensing behavior, here, we present a kind of biomimetic, ionic, and fully passive mechanotransduction mechanism leveraging mechanical modulation of interfacial ionic p-n junction (IPNJ) through microchannels. Sensors based on this mechanism do not rely on an external power supply and can encode external tactile stimuli into highly analogous signal outputs to those of natural skin receptors, in terms of both signal type (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBr J Psychiatry
January 2025
Department of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, UK; and Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford, UK.
Background: Reliable and specific biomarkers that can distinguish autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) from commonly co-occurring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are lacking, causing misses and delays in diagnosis, and reducing access to interventions and quality of life.
Aims: To examine whether an innovative, brief (1-min), videogame method called Computerised Assessment of Motor Imitation (CAMI), can identify ASD-specific imitation differences compared with neurotypical children and children with ADHD.
Method: This cross-sectional study used CAMI alongside standardised parent-report (Social Responsiveness Scale, Second Edition) and observational measures of autism (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Second Edition; ADOS-2), ADHD (Conners) and motor ability (Physical and Neurological Examination for Soft Signs).
Neural Netw
January 2025
Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), 138632, Singapore. Electronic address:
Accurate decoding of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in the shortest possible time is essential for the realization of a high-performance brain-computer interface (BCI) system based on the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP). However, the degradation of decoding performance of short-length EEG signals is often unavoidable due to the reduced information, which hinders the development of BCI systems in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a relaxed matching knowledge distillation (RMKD) method to transfer both feature-level and logit-level knowledge in a relaxed manner to improve the decoding performance of short-length EEG signals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Integr Neurosci
January 2025
Department of Physical Therapy, Hangzhou Geriatric Hospital, 310022 Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
Background: Observation, execution, and imitation of target actions based on mirror neuron network (MNN) have become common physiotherapy strategies. Electrical stimulation (ES) is a common intervention to improve muscle strength and motor control in rehabilitation treatments. It is possible to enhance MNN's activation by combining motor execution (ME) and motor imitation (MI) with ES simultaneously.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomimetics (Basel)
January 2025
RoboticsLab, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Madrid, Spain.
Motion primitives are a highly useful and widely employed tool in the field of Learning from Demonstration (LfD). However, obtaining a large number of motion primitives can be a tedious process, as they typically need to be generated individually for each task to be learned. To address this challenge, this work presents an algorithm for acquiring robotic skills through automatic and unsupervised segmentation.
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