Ianì Francesco, Burin Dalila, Salatino Adriana, Pia Lorenzo, Ricci Raffaella, Bucciarelli Monica
Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Torino, Torino, Italy.
Smart-Aging Research Center & IDAC-Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.
Brain Lang. 2018 May-Jul;180-182:8-13. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2018.03.001. Epub 2018 Apr 10.
Memory for action phrases improves in the listeners when the speaker accompanies them with gestures compared to when the speaker stays still. Since behavioral studies revealed a pivotal role of the listeners' motor system, we aimed to disentangle the role of primary motor and premotor cortices. Participants had to recall phrases uttered by a speaker in two conditions: in the gesture condition, the speaker performed gestures congruent with the action; in the no-gesture condition, the speaker stayed still. In Experiment 1, half of the participants underwent inhibitory rTMS over the hand/arm region of the left premotor cortex (PMC) and the other half over the hand/arm region of the left primary motor cortex (M1). The enactment effect disappeared only following rTMS over PMC. In Experiment 2, we detected the usual enactment effect after rTMS over vertex, thereby excluding possible nonspecific rTMS effects. These findings suggest that the information encoded in the premotor cortex is a crucial part of the memory trace.
与说话者静止不动时相比，当说话者用手势辅助表达动作短语时，听众对这些短语的记忆会有所改善。由于行为研究揭示了听众运动系统的关键作用，我们旨在厘清初级运动皮层和运动前皮层的作用。参与者必须在两种情况下回忆说话者说出的短语：在有手势的情况下，说话者做出与动作一致的手势；在无手势的情况下，说话者保持静止。在实验1中，一半的参与者在左侧运动前皮层（PMC）的手部/手臂区域接受抑制性重复经颅磁刺激（rTMS），另一半在左侧初级运动皮层（M1）的手部/手臂区域接受抑制性rTMS。只有在对PMC进行rTMS后， enactment效应才消失。在实验2中，我们在对头顶进行rTMS后检测到了通常的enactment效应，从而排除了可能的非特异性rTMS效应。这些发现表明，运动前皮层中编码的信息是记忆痕迹的关键部分。
