Abstract
Functional activity levels of the human primary motor cortex during motor performance and motor imagery were investigated by a functional magnetic resonance imaging technique, sensitive to local changes of blood oxygenation. Subjects repetitively performed three different tasks: sequential finger-to-thumb opposition movements of the right hand, mental imagery of the same motor sequence, and mental imagery of a visual scene (taken as a reference state). A significant increase in signal intensity relative to the control condition was found in the precentral gyrus during both motor performance and motor imagery tasks. Even if the intensity of activation was much less during motor imagery, these results suggest a functional involvement of the primary motor cortex during mental imagery of sequential motor acts, not previously detected by mapping techniques with coarser spatial resolution.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Baraldi, P., Cettolo, V., Francescato, M.P., Diamond, M.E., Porro, C.A. (1997). Activity of the Human Primary Motor Cortex During Motor Performance and Motor Imagery : A Functional Magnetic Resonance Investigation. In: Lakshminarayanan, V. (eds) Basic and Clinical Applications of Vision Science. Documenta Ophthalmologica Proceedings Series, vol 60. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5698-1_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5698-1_20
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