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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on August 18, 2004
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhh157
© 2004 by Oxford University Press
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Article

Is Broca's Area Crucial for Imitation?

Michiru Makuuchi 1*

1 Division of Human Brain Research, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Retzius väg 8, A3; 3 Stockholm171 77, Sweden and Department of Speech Physiology, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: makvvci{at}m.u-tokyo.ac.jp.


  Abstract

Some neuroimaging studies have reported activation by imitation in the left Brodmann area 44 (BA 44), a part of Broca's area considered to be a neural substrate for speech production. However, in these previous studies the subjects were required to perform the same movements repeatedly so that the experimental stimuli could be viewed as cues when to do the given movements rather than a specification of what to do. Activation in the left BA 44 has also been observed in delayed motor execution tasks. This may confound the activity in BA 44 for imitation tasks used in the former studies. We tested the involvement of bilateral BA 44 and BA 45 in imitation and delayed execution tasks by functional magnetic resonance imaging with cytoarchitectonically defined BA 44 and BA 45 as volumes of interest. Our tasks required the subjects to perform a transformation from visual information (photographs of hand postures or symbolic specification of the postures) into a new hand movement in each trial. A three-way analysis of variance was performed with factors instruction, execution timing and area. The results revealed significant main effect by execution timing and by area, but not by instruction. We conclude that Broca's area does not play a pivotal role in imitation.

Keywords: brain mapping; cerebral cortex; imitative behavior; magnetic resonance imaging; motor skills.
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