Volumetric brain alterations in children with primary complex motor stereotypies: a baseline and longitudinal report.

Over the last decades, a growing body of literature suggested that memory functions are not a modal but rather represent cognitive processes influenced by sensorimotor activations (; ). Based on this theoretical conceptualization of memory, a wide range of cognitive and neuroscientific research has investigated the role of sensorimotor information in memory. Several studies investigated the effectiveness of so-called “embodied mental simulations” at encoding, that is, cognitive processes that allow to simulate visual, sensory and motor aspects of the material to be learned. For instance, recent studies show that memory performance is improved both when individuals actively imagine the visual characteristics of the items to be studied, i.e., mental imagery () and when they actively simulate a physical interaction with the objects, involving sensory and motor information, i.e., motor imagery (MI) (e.g., ). compared different simulation strategies (visual imagery, third-person motor imagery and first-person motor imagery) with a “mental rehearsal” control condition involving low-embodiment strategies (i.e., mentally rehearsing the word with no explicit perceptual and/or motor simulation instruction). They found that all simulations were more efficient than the mental rehearsal condition and that first person motor imagery was the most effective (see also ). The beneficial effect of sensori-motor simulation on memory is not limited to mental and motor imagery. For instance, memory for action sentences such as “Peel a banana” improves when participants simulate the action through gestures involving motor components (e.g., ). Similarly, memory enhancement is observed when individuals observe the gestures of others (see ), as well as through action observation (AO) which has been shown to enhance episodic memory performance in several studies (; ). The hypothesized underlying facilitating mechanism is the motor contribution (; ), due to the mirror system, elicited by action observation (e.g., ). In other words, observing actions should trigger a sort of covert motor simulation, or a “motor resonance” of the main components of the observed action (). Other forms of sensorimotor activation that seem to have a positive effect on memory are those involved in the simple visual presentation of objects. A substantial body of literature has shown that this can automatically activate affordances, i.e., the covert motor simulation of the action that usually is performed with the objects (e.g., ) that has also been shown to play a role in memory processes (e.g., ). showed that memory for objects presented as words (which only indirectly prime the sensorimotor system) was generally less accurate compared to memory for objects presented as photographs, which are more likely to directly activate the sensory-motor associated affordances (a phenomenon usually called “picture superiority effect,” ).