Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people understand language about their own actions they activate premotor regions they use to perform these actions.Do people understand language about other peoples actions by imagining how they perform these actions themselves, orhow they perceive others performing them? Here, we recorded BOLD fMRI while left- and right-handers read about andthen imagined their own unimanual actions (e.g. you write) or others actions (e.g. she writes). When imagining theirown manual actions, participants preferentially activated PMC circuits controlling their dominant hand. By contrast, whenimagining others actions, participants PMC activity reflected both how they perform actions themselves and how theytypically see actions performed by right-handers (about 90% of people they see). Language-induced motor imagery forour own actions reflects how we use our own bodies, whereas imagery for others actions also reflects how others use theirbodies, even if their bodies differ from our own.