AUTHOR=Giannopulu Irini , Mizutani Haruo TITLE=Neural Kinesthetic Contribution to Motor Imagery of Body Parts: Tongue, Hands, and Feet JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience VOLUME=Volume 15 - 2021 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2021.602723 DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2021.602723 ISSN=1662-5161 ABSTRACT=

Motor imagery (MI) is assimilated to a perception-action process, which is mentally represented. Although several models suggest that MI, and its equivalent motor execution, engage very similar brain areas, the mechanisms underlying MI and their associated components are still under investigation today. Using 22 Ag/AgCl EEG electrodes, 19 healthy participants (nine males and 10 females) with an average age of 25.8 years old (sd = 3.5 years) were required to imagine moving several parts of their body (i.e., first-person perspective) one by one: left and right hand, tongue, and feet. Network connectivity analysis based on graph theory, together with a correlational analysis, were performed on the data. The findings suggest evidence for motor and somesthetic neural synchronization and underline the role of the parietofrontal network for the tongue imagery task only. At both unilateral and bilateral cortical levels, only the tongue imagery task appears to be associated with motor and somatosensory representations, that is, kinesthetic representations, which might contribute to verbal actions. As such, the present findings suggest the idea that imagined tongue movements, involving segmentary kinesthetic actions, could be the prerequisite of language.