TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gianelli, Claudia
A1  - Kühne, Katharina
A1  - Lo Presti, Sara
A1  - Mencaraglia, Silvia
A1  - Dalla Volta, Riccardo
T1  - Action processing in the motor system
BT  - Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) evidence of shared mechanisms in the visual and linguistic modalities
JF  - Brain and cognition : a journal of experimental and clinical research
N2  - In two experiments, we compared the dynamics of corticospinal excitability when processing visually or linguistically presented tool-oriented hand actions in native speakers and sequential bilinguals. In a third experiment we used the same procedure to test non-motor, low-level stimuli, i.e. scrambled images and pseudo-words.
Stimuli were presented in sequence: pictures (tool + tool-oriented hand action or their scrambled counterpart) and words (tool noun + tool-action verb or pseudo-words). Experiment 1 presented German linguistic stimuli to native speakers, while Experiment 2 presented English stimuli to non-natives. Experiment 3 tested Italian native speakers. Single-pulse trascranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS) was applied to the left motor cortex at five different timings: baseline, 200 ms after tool/noun onset, 150, 350 and 500 ms after hand/verb onset with motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and abductor digiti minimi (ADM) muscles. 
We report strong similarities in the dynamics of corticospinal excitability across the visual and linguistic modalities. MEPs' suppression started as early as 150 ms and lasted for the duration of stimulus presentation (500 ms). Moreover, we show that this modulation is absent for stimuli with no motor content. Overall, our study supports the notion of a core, overarching system of action semantics shared by different modalities.
KW  - TMS
KW  - motor cortex
KW  - action observation
KW  - action language
KW  - motor
KW  - inhibition
KW  - motor-evoked potentials
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2019.105510
SN  - 0278-2626
SN  - 1090-2147
VL  - 139
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  -