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Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity

Over the last decades, scientists have questioned the origin of the exquisite human mastery of tools. Seminal studies in monkeys, healthy participants and brain-damaged patients have primarily focused on the plastic changes that tool-use induces on spatial representations. More recently, we focused...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Martel, Marie, Cardinali, Lucilla, Roy, Alice C., Farnè, Alessandro
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Routledge 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4975077/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27315277
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2016.1167678
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author Martel, Marie
Cardinali, Lucilla
Roy, Alice C.
Farnè, Alessandro
author_facet Martel, Marie
Cardinali, Lucilla
Roy, Alice C.
Farnè, Alessandro
author_sort Martel, Marie
collection PubMed
description Over the last decades, scientists have questioned the origin of the exquisite human mastery of tools. Seminal studies in monkeys, healthy participants and brain-damaged patients have primarily focused on the plastic changes that tool-use induces on spatial representations. More recently, we focused on the modifications tool-use must exert on the sensorimotor system and highlighted plastic changes at the level of the body representation used by the brain to control our movements, i.e., the Body Schema. Evidence is emerging for tool-use to affect also more visually and conceptually based representations of the body, such as the Body Image. Here we offer a critical review of the way different tool-use paradigms have been, and should be, used to try disentangling the critical features that are responsible for tool incorporation into different body representations. We will conclude that tool-use may offer a very valuable means to investigate high-order body representations and their plasticity.
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spelling pubmed-49750772016-08-25 Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity Martel, Marie Cardinali, Lucilla Roy, Alice C. Farnè, Alessandro Cogn Neuropsychol Articles Over the last decades, scientists have questioned the origin of the exquisite human mastery of tools. Seminal studies in monkeys, healthy participants and brain-damaged patients have primarily focused on the plastic changes that tool-use induces on spatial representations. More recently, we focused on the modifications tool-use must exert on the sensorimotor system and highlighted plastic changes at the level of the body representation used by the brain to control our movements, i.e., the Body Schema. Evidence is emerging for tool-use to affect also more visually and conceptually based representations of the body, such as the Body Image. Here we offer a critical review of the way different tool-use paradigms have been, and should be, used to try disentangling the critical features that are responsible for tool incorporation into different body representations. We will conclude that tool-use may offer a very valuable means to investigate high-order body representations and their plasticity. Routledge 2016-02-17 2016-06-17 /pmc/articles/PMC4975077/ /pubmed/27315277 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2016.1167678 Text en © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Articles
Martel, Marie
Cardinali, Lucilla
Roy, Alice C.
Farnè, Alessandro
Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity
title Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity
title_full Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity
title_fullStr Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity
title_full_unstemmed Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity
title_short Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity
title_sort tool-use: an open window into body representation and its plasticity
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4975077/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27315277
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2016.1167678
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