Department of Psychology, Second University of Naples, Caserta, Italy.
Brain Cogn. 2010 Aug;73(3):189-93. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2010.05.001. Epub 2010 May 26.
Several lines of evidence demonstrate that the motor system is involved in motor simulation of actions, but some uncertainty exists about the consequences of lesions of descending motor pathways on mental imagery tasks. Moreover, recent findings suggest that the motor system could also have a role in recognition of body parts. To address these issues in the present study we assessed patients with a complete damage of descending motor pathways (locked-in syndrome, LIS) on the hand laterality task, requiring subjects to decide whether a hand stimulus in a given spatial orientation represents a left or a right hand. LIS patients were less accurate than healthy controls in judging hand laterality; more importantly, LIS patients' performance was modulated by spatial orientation of hand stimuli whereas it was not affected by biomechanical constraints. These findings demonstrate a dissociation between spared hand recognition and impaired access to action simulation processes in LIS patients.
有几条证据表明运动系统参与了动作的运动模拟，但关于下行运动通路损伤对心理意象任务的影响还存在一些不确定性。此外，最近的研究结果表明，运动系统在识别身体部位方面也可能发挥作用。为了解决这些问题，我们在本研究中评估了完全损伤下行运动通路的患者（闭锁综合征，LIS）在手的偏向性任务上的表现，要求患者判断给定空间方向的手部刺激是左手还是右手。与健康对照组相比，LIS 患者在手的偏向性判断上的准确性较低；更重要的是，LIS 患者的表现受到手部刺激的空间方向的调节，而不受生物力学限制的影响。这些发现表明，在 LIS 患者中，手的识别能力得以保留，而动作模拟过程的获取受到了损害。
