Ricerc@Sapienza

Previous studies indicated that, in specific conditions, pointing movements during encoding facilitate the recognition of spatial arrays in a working memory task. Another set of studies examined the representation of another person's actions and suggested that they are encoded in the same way as one's own actions. A different line of research have examined that imagining performing an action, and actually performing it, activates the same areas in the brain. Hence, given these findings, the present study is aimed at investigating the question of how self- performed movements, observed movements or imagined movements are represented and how they interact with visuo-spatial working memory. Lateralized Readiness Potentials (LRPs) and NoGo P3 are expected to give insights about the movement preparation, inhibition and monitoring in both a joint task setting and an individual setting. Participants will perform a task that requires the maintenance of two consecutive arrays of three or four items, one encoded only by visual observation, the other by visual observation accompanied by pointing movements (performed either by the participant or by the experimenter or imagined). We predict that movement- observation and imagination should result into facilitated array recognition, and that this effect should be similar to that produced by self-performed pointing movements. LRPs are expected to appear in each action condition (observation, imagination and execution) and NoGo P3 component is expected to appear for the NoGo trials the joint setting condition when it's not the participant's turn to point. We propose that this performance benefit reflects either motor simulation or richness of encoding.