Bodily form, actions and motor skills’ neural representations: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation studies.

Recent years have seen the development of new neurophysiological techniques that deepened the knowledge of neural processes underlying simple as well as complex brain mechanisms of behaviour and cognitive processes. Knowledge about body and motor representations in the brain has advanced much through the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys and their putative homologous counterpart in humans. Simulative-like mechanisms have been proposed to be at the base of perceptive and cognitive functions. The present work focuses on neural underpinnings of visual body and action perception and motor skills representation in the motor system. These issues are at the core of plastic neural changes in action learning, understanding and higher cognitive functions as abstract motor reasoning and identity categorization. This thesis reports three studies in which these domains have been studied through single- pulse TMS and high-frequency event-related repetitive TMS procedures.