Giovanni Federico, François Osiurak, Giuseppina Ciccarelli, Ciro Rosario Ilardi, Carlo Cavaliere, Liberatore Tramontano, Vincenzo Alfano, Miriana Migliaccio, Angelica Di Cecca, Marco Salvatore, Maria Antonella Brandimonte
Tool-use skills represent a significant cognitive leap in human evolution, playing a crucial role in the emergence of complex technologies. Yet, the neural mechanisms underlying such capabilities are still debated. Here we explore with fMRI the functional brain networks involved in tool-related action understanding. Participants viewed images depicting action-consistent (e.g., nail-hammer) and action-inconsistent (e.g., scarf-hammer) object-tool pairs, under three conditions: semantic (recognizing the tools previously seen in the pairs), mechanical (assessing the usability of the pairs), and control (looking at the pairs without explicit tasks)...
November 14, 2023: Communications Biology