Use It or Move It: Two Action Systems in the Human Brain

Over 10 years of research in our laboratory suggests that humans possess a specialized system for skilled object-related action representations that differs in a number of important ways from a more primitive system for "on line" spatiomotor coding common to humans and other primates. We will present data from behavioral and fMRI studies that address a number of striking distinctions between these systems in terms of content, time course of information activation, spatiomotor frames of reference, and neuroanatomy. We'll also describe new work exploring the potential of each system to compensate for damage in the other, and thus potentially benefit the rehabilitation of patients with action disorders.