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Original Research ARTICLE

Body-specific motor imagery of hand actions: neural evidence from right- and left-handers

Roel M. Willems^1,2*, Ivan Toni¹, Peter Hagoort^1,3 and Daniel Casasanto³

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

If motor imagery uses neural structures involved in action execution, then the neural correlates of imagining an action should differ between individuals who tend to execute the action differently. Here we report fMRI data showing that motor imagery is influenced by the way people habitually perform motor actions with their particular bodies; that is, motor imagery is ‘body-specific’ (Casasanto, 2009 ). During mental imagery for complex hand actions, activation of cortical areas involved in motor planning and execution was left-lateralized in right-handers but right-lateralized in left-handers. We conclude that motor imagery involves the generation of an action plan that is grounded in the participant’s motor habits, not just an abstract representation at the level of the action’s goal. People with different patterns of motor experience form correspondingly different neurocognitive representations of imagined actions.

Keywords:

imagery, motor, handedness, fMRI, neuroimaging, embodied

Citation:

Willems RM, Toni I, Hagoort P and Casasanto D (2009). Body-specific motor imagery of hand actions: neural evidence from right- and left-handers. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 3:39. doi: 10.3389/neuro.09.039.2009

Received:

20 June 2009;

Paper pending published:

28 August 2009;

Accepted:

09 October 2009;

Published online:

10 November 2009.

Edited by:

Olaf Blanke, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; University of Geneva, Switzerland

Reviewed by:

Thomas F. Münte, University of Magdeburg, Germany
Douglas O. Cheyne, Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute, Canada

© 2009 Willems, Toni, Hagoort and Casasanto. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Roel M. Willems, Helen Wills Institute for Neuroscience, University of California Berkeley, 132 Barker Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-3190, USA. e-mail: roelwillems@berkeley.edu