It is still controversial whether mental practice-the internal rehearsal of movements to improve later performance-relies on processes engaged during physical motor performance and, if so, which processes these are. We ...

We investigated whether top-down expectations about an actor's intentions affect action perception in a representational momentum (RM) paradigm. Participants heard an actor declare an intention to either take or leave an ...

Action observation is often conceptualized in a bottom-up manner, where sensory information activates conceptual (or motor) representations. In contrast, here we show that expectations about an actor's goal have a top-down ...

An important question for the study of social interactions is how the motor actions of others are represented. Research has demonstrated that simply watching someone perform an action activates a similar motor representation ...

Humans use the same representations to code self-produced and observed actions. Neurophysiological evidence for this view comes from the discovery of the so-called mirror neurons in premotor cortex of the macaque monkey. ...

Hand signs with symbolic meaning can often be utilized more successfully than words to communicate an intention; however, the underlying brain mechanisms are undefined. The present study using magnetoencephalography (MEG) ...

Sensorimotor regions of the brain have been implicated in simulation processes such as action understanding and empathy, but their functional role in these processes remains unspecified. We used functional magnetic resonance ...

Meaningful and meaningless hand postures were presented to subjects who had to carry out a semantic discrimination task while electrical brain responses were recorded. Both meaningful and control sets of hand postures were ...

Seeing a face gaze at an object elicits rapid attention shifts toward the same object. We tested whether gaze cueing is predictive: do people shift their attention toward objects others are merely expected to look at? ...

When an observed action (e.g., kicking) is compatible to a to be produced action (e.g., a foot-key response as compared to a finger-key response), then the self-produced action is more fluent, that is, it is more accurate ...