Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Table of Contents - August 2012 - Volume 35, Issue 04  

Open Peer Commentary

An area specifically devoted to tool use in human left inferior parietal lobule

Guy A. Orbana1 and Giacomo Rizzolattia1a2

a1 Department of Neuroscience, Parma University, Parma, 43100 Italy

a2 IIT Brain Center for Social and Motor Cognition, Parma, 43100 Italy. guy.orban@med.kuleuven.be

Abstract

A comparative fMRI study by Peeters et al. (2009) provided evidence that a specific sector of left inferior parietal lobule is devoted to tool use in humans, but not in monkeys. We propose that this area represents the neural substrate of the human capacity to understand tool use by using causal reasoning.

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