HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Pierno, A. C. Articles by Castiello, U. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Pierno, A. C. Articles by Castiello, U.

When Gaze Turns into Grasp

¹ Università di Padova, Italy, ² Università di Torino, Italy, ³ Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Reprint requests should be sent to Umberto Castiello, Dipartimento di Psicologia Generale, Università di Padova, Via Venezia, 8, 35131 Padova, Italy, or via e-mail: umberto.castiello{at}unipd.it.

Previous research has provided evidence for a neural system underlying the observation of another person's hand actions. Is the neural system involved in this capacity also important in inferring another person's motor intentions toward an object from their eye gaze? In real-life situations, humans use eye movements to catch and direct the attention of others, often without any accompanying hand movements or speech. In an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study, subjects observed videos showing a human model either grasping a target object (grasping condition) or simply gazing (gaze condition) at the same object. These two conditions were contrasted with each other and against a control condition in which the human model was standing behind the object without performing any gazing or grasping action. The results revealed activations within the dorsal premotor cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, the inferior parietal lobule, and the superior temporal sulcus in both "grasping" and "gaze" conditions. These findings suggest that signaling the presence of an object through gaze elicits in an observer a similar neural response to that elicited by the observation of a reach-to-grasp action performed on the same object.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				C. Becchio, A. Pierno, M. Mari, D. Lusher, and U. Castiello Motor contagion from gaze: the case of autism Brain, September 1, 2007; 130(9): 2401 - 2411. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]