A sensorimotor network for actions and intentions reading: a series of TMS studies

Information relevant for our social life are immediately processed by our brain. When we walk in the street we easily and quite automatically adjust our path to avoid colliding other people. Several social activities like working in a group, playing a sport, talking with people and many others, all require the ability to carefully read others movements. Thus, kinematics and postural information of others‟ body are a fundamental medium for good survival in our social environment. Along the reading of this manuscript a series of extensive and novel studies will describe the role of sensorimotor cortices and their differential contribution in specific action observation tasks. By means of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) we tested in healthy subjects both low and high cognitive level processes that may require areas of the action observation network.