fMRI studies of the sensory and motor areas involved in movement

A wide range of natural hand movements such as grasping, exploring or manipulating objects activates a parietal-premotor network upstream of motor cortex. The specific representations of each motor act are embedded in this circuitry and reflect the demands imposed by the sensory and motor processes involved in these motor behaviours including oculomotor and attentional control and memory processes. Further, the same network is activated during the observation or imagination of these movements. These complex intertwined and partially overlapping functional maps can be segregated in the time domain by means of real time techniques such as MEG that allow to disentangle the sequential processing stages.