TY - JOUR
T1 - Encoding of human action in Broca's area
AU - Fazio, Patrik
AU - Cantagallo, Anna
AU - Craighero, Laila
AU - D'ausilio, Alessandro
AU - Roy, Alice C.
AU - Pozzo, Thierry
AU - Calzolari, Ferdinando
AU - Granieri, Enrico
AU - Fadiga, Luciano
PY - 2009/7
Y1 - 2009/7
N2 - 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 form a crucial node of a human mirror-neuron system. If, on the one hand, neuroimaging studies use a correlational approach which cannot offer a final proof for such claims, available neuropsychological data fail to offer a conclusive demonstration for two main reasons: (i) they use tasks taxing both language and action systems; and (ii) they rarely consider the possibility that Broca's aphasics may also be affected by some form of apraxia. We administered a novel action comprehension test - with almost no linguistic requirements - on selected frontal aphasic patients lacking apraxic symptoms. Patients, as well as matched controls, were shown short movies of human actions or of physical events. Their task consisted of ordering, in a temporal sequence, four pictures taken from each movie and randomly presented on the computer screen. Patient's performance showed a specific dissociation in their ability to re-order pictures of human actions (impaired) with respect to physical events (spared). Our study provides a demonstration that frontal aphasics, not affected by apraxia, are specifically impaired in their capability to correctly encode observed human actions. The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org2009
AB - 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 form a crucial node of a human mirror-neuron system. If, on the one hand, neuroimaging studies use a correlational approach which cannot offer a final proof for such claims, available neuropsychological data fail to offer a conclusive demonstration for two main reasons: (i) they use tasks taxing both language and action systems; and (ii) they rarely consider the possibility that Broca's aphasics may also be affected by some form of apraxia. We administered a novel action comprehension test - with almost no linguistic requirements - on selected frontal aphasic patients lacking apraxic symptoms. Patients, as well as matched controls, were shown short movies of human actions or of physical events. Their task consisted of ordering, in a temporal sequence, four pictures taken from each movie and randomly presented on the computer screen. Patient's performance showed a specific dissociation in their ability to re-order pictures of human actions (impaired) with respect to physical events (spared). Our study provides a demonstration that frontal aphasics, not affected by apraxia, are specifically impaired in their capability to correctly encode observed human actions. The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org2009
KW - action recognition
KW - Broca's area
KW - frontal aphasia
KW - mirror-neuron system
KW - motor syntax
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U2 - 10.1093/brain/awp118
DO - 10.1093/brain/awp118
M3 - Article
C2 - 19443630
AN - SCOPUS:67650034297
VL - 132
SP - 1980
EP - 1988
JO - Brain
JF - Brain
SN - 0006-8950
IS - 7
ER -