The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action

This book is one of the first in an exciting new series of tutorials in cognitive neuroscience, and provides a concise, readable and up-to-date review of cognitive and neuroscience studies of the representations for actions. The fundamental question addressed concerns the nature and role of different representations in the planning and execution of movements. Adopting a cognitive neuroscience approach to this question generates a new perspective and some challenging hypotheses. The book explores in detail the contribution of the brain structures and particularly the cerebral cortex, to the various aspects of movement preparation and execution. In so doing, the author discusses a wide range of evidence including the study of anatomical connections between areas, the recording of single neuron activity in animals, and brain stimulation and imaging studies in human subjects. In The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action this neuroscience evidence is related to both behavioral experiments in normal subjects and clinical observations in brain-lesioned subjects, resulting in provocative hypotheses about the cognitive structure of central representations and processes which underlie actions.

Marc Jeannerod is Professor of Psychology at INSERM, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Lyon.