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Embodying Functionally Relevant Action Sounds In Patients With Spinal Cord Injury, Mariella Pazzaglia, Giulia Galli, James W. Lewis, Giorgio Scivoletto, Anna Maria Giannini, Marco Molinari

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Growing evidence indicates that perceptual-motor codes may be associated with and influenced by actual bodily states. Following a spinal cord injury (SCI), for example, individuals exhibit reduced visual sensitivity to biological motion. However, a dearth of direct evidence exists about whether profound alterations in sensorimotor traffic between the body and brain influence audio-motor representations. We tested 20 wheelchair-bound individuals with lower skeletal-level SCI who were unable to feel and move their lower limbs, but have retained upper limb function. In a two-choice, matching-to-sample auditory discrimination task, the participants were asked to determine which of two action sounds matched a sample …