摘要：Background. Concepts of movement and action are not completely synonymous,but what distinguishes one from the other? Movement may be defined as stimulusdrivenmotor acts, while action implies realization of a specific motor goal, essentialfor cognitively driven behavior. Although recent clinical and neuroimagingstudies have revealed some areas of the brain that mediate cognitive aspects ofhuman motor behavior, the identification of the basic neural circuit underlying theinteraction between cognitive and motor functions remains a challenge for neurophysiologyand psychology.Objective. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) to investigate elementary cognitive aspects of human motor behavior.Design. Twenty healthy right-handed volunteers were asked to perform stimulus-driven and goal-directed movements by clenching the right hand into a fist (7times). The cognitive component lay in anticipation of simple stimuli signals. In orderto disentangle the purely motor component of stimulus-driven movements, we usedthe event-related (ER) paradigm. fMRI was performed on a 3 Tesla Siemens MagnetomVerio MR-scanner with 32-channel head coil.Results. We have shown differences in the localization of brain activity dependingon the involvement of cognitive functions. These differences testify to the role ofthe cerebellum and the right hemisphere in motor cognition. In particular, our resultssuggest that right associative cortical areas, together with the right posterolateral cerebellum(Crus I and lobule VI) and basal ganglia, define cognitive control of motoractivity, promoting a shift from a stimulus-driven to a goal-directed mode.
