Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity.
Over the last decades, scientists have questioned the origin of the exquisite human mastery of tools. Seminal studies in monkeys, healthy participants and brain-damaged patients have primarily focused on the plastic changes that tool-use induces on spatial representations. More recently, we focused on the modifications tool-use must exert on the sensorimotor system and highlighted plastic changes at the level of the body representation used by the brain to control our movements, i.e., the Body Schema. Evidence is emerging for tool-use to affect also more visually and conceptually based representations of the body, such as the Body Image. Here we offer a critical review of the way different tool-use paradigms have been, and should be, used to try disentangling the critical features that are responsible for tool incorporation into different body representations. We will conclude that tool-use may offer a very valuable means to investigate high-order body representations and their plasticity.
a Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, CNRS UMR 5596 , Lyon 69007 , France.|b University of Lyon , Lyon 69000 , France.
Marie
M
Martel
c The Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario , London , ON , Canada.
Lucilla
L
Cardinali
a Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, CNRS UMR 5596 , Lyon 69007 , France.|b University of Lyon , Lyon 69000 , France.
Alice C
AC
Roy
b University of Lyon , Lyon 69000 , France.|d Integrative Multisensory Perception Action & Cognition team (ImpAct), Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, INSERM U1028, CNRS UMR5292 , Lyon 69000 , France.|e Hospices Civils de Lyon, Mouvement et Handicap & Neuro-immersion , Lyon 69000 , France.
Alessandro
A
Farnè
D001828:Body Image; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*
Tool-use; body image; body schema; kinematics; peripersonal space