MOTOR INTENTION, IMAGERY AND REPRESENTATION: BBS Call for Commentators

[Stevan Harnad]

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article by MARC JEANNEROD,
on MOTOR INTENTION, IMAGERY AND REPRESENTATION, that has been accepted
for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an
international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary
on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral
and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be current BBS Associates or
nominated by a current BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator
for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for
information about how to become a BBS Associate, please send email to:

harnad at clarity.princeton.edu  or harnad at pucc.bitnet        or write to:
BBS, 20 Nassau Street, #240, Princeton NJ 08542  [tel: 609-921-7771]

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some
indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your
areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. An
electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection by anonymous
ftp according to the instructions that follow after the abstract.
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THE REPRESENTING BRAIN: NEURAL CORRELATES OF MOTOR INTENTION AND IMAGERY

                Marc Jeannerod
                Vision et Motricite
                INSERM Unite 94
                16 avenue du Doyen Lepine
                69500 Bron
                France

KEYWORDS: affordances, goals, intention, motor imagery, motor schemata,
neural codes, object manipulation, planning, posterior parietal cortex,
premotor cortex, representation.

ABSTRACT: This target article concerns how motor actions are neurally
represented and coded. Action planning and motor preparation can be
studied using motor imagery. A close functional equivalence between
motor imagery and motor preparation is suggested by the positive
effects of imagining movements on motor learning, the similarity
between the neural structures involved, and the similar physiological
correlates observed in both imagining and preparing. The content of
motor representations can be inferred from motor images at a
macroscopic level: from global aspects of the action (the duration and
amount of effort involved) and from the motor rules and constraints
which predict the spatial path and kinematics of movements. A
microscopic neural account of the represenation of object-oriented
action is described. Object attributes are processed in different
neural pathways depending on the kind of task the subject is
performing. During object-oriented action, a pragmatic representation
is activated in which object affordances are transformed into specific
motor schemata independently of other tasks such as object recognition.
Animal as well as clinical data implicate posterior parietal and
premotor cortical areas in schema instantiation. A mechanism is
proposed that is able to encode the desired goal of the action and is
applicable to different levels of representational organization.

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To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable by anonymous ftp from
princeton.edu according to the instructions below (the filename is
bbs.jeannerod). Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft. Just
let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you
feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article.
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