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Michael Andres
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2021) 33 (4): 611–621.
Published: 01 April 2021
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All it takes is a face-to-face conversation in a noisy environment to realize that viewing a speaker's lip movements contributes to speech comprehension. What are the processes underlying the perception and interpretation of visual speech? Brain areas that control speech production are also recruited during lipreading. This finding raises the possibility that lipreading may be supported, at least to some extent, by a covert unconscious imitation of the observed speech movements in the observer's own speech motor system—a motor simulation. However, whether, and if so to what extent, motor simulation contributes to visual speech interpretation remains unclear. In two experiments, we found that several participants with congenital facial paralysis were as good at lipreading as the control population and performed these tasks in a way that is qualitatively similar to the controls despite severely reduced or even completely absent lip motor representations. Although it remains an open question whether this conclusion generalizes to other experimental conditions and to typically developed participants, these findings considerably narrow the space of hypothesis for a role of motor simulation in lipreading. Beyond its theoretical significance in the field of speech perception, this finding also calls for a re-examination of the more general hypothesis that motor simulation underlies action perception and interpretation developed in the frameworks of motor simulation and mirror neuron hypotheses.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2007) 19 (4): 563–576.
Published: 01 April 2007
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The finding that number processing activates a cortical network partly overlapping that recruited for hand movements has renewed interest in the relationship between number and finger representations. Further evidence about a possible link between fingers and numbers comes from developmental studies showing that finger movements play a crucial role in learning counting. However, increased activity in hand motor circuits during counting may unveil unspecific processes, such as shifting attention, reciting number names, or matching items with a number name. To address this issue, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to measure changes in corticospinal (CS) excitability during a counting task performed silently and using either numbers or letters of the alphabet to enumerate items. We found an increased CS excitability of hand muscles during the counting task, irrespective of the use of numbers or letters, whereas it was unchanged in arm and foot muscles. Control tasks allowed us to rule out a possible influence of attention allocation or covert speech on CS excitability increase of hand muscles during counting. The present results support a specific involvement of hand motor circuits in counting because no CS changes were found in arm and foot muscles during the same task. However, the contribution of hand motor areas is not exclusively related to number processing because an increase in CS excitability was also found when letters were used to enumerate items. This finding suggests that hand motor circuits are involved whenever items have to be put in correspondence with the elements of any ordered series.