Examining the processing of others’ body-related information in the perceivers’ brain (action observation) across the neurotypical and clinical population is a key topic in cognitive neurosciences. However, what happens beyond the perceptual stage, namely, when the body is not within view and it is transformed into an associative form that can be stored, updated, and later recalled (a body-related memory) remains poorly understood. Here we examine neurobehavioural evidence on the encoding and memory maintenance of visually perceived bodily stimuli such as actions and static bodies. The reviewed studies suggest that encoding and maintaining visually perceived bodies in memory recruit our body and sensorimotor representations in the brain. This mechanism operates whether memory recall involves action recognition or reproduction, being mostly disrupted when increasing bodily information in the visual and/or body domain; observing others’ movements or moving one’s body. Overall, this work gives an overview of those processes involved in memorising multifaceted stimuli (i.e., bodies vs. arbitrary stimuli) from the memory, embodiment, and action perception frameworks.

在整个认知神经科学和临床人群中，检查感知者大脑中他人与身体有关的信息的处理（行为观察）是认知神经科学的关键主题。但是，在感知阶段之外发生的事情，即当身体不在视野内并且被转换为可以存储，更新和以后调用的关联形式（与身体有关的记忆）时，仍然知之甚少。在这里，我们检查了关于视觉感知的身体刺激（例如动作和静态物体）的编码和记忆维持的神经行为证据。审查的研究表明，在记忆中编码和维持视觉感知的身体会招募我们在大脑中的身体和感觉运动表征。无论记忆调用涉及动作识别还是再现，该机制都可以运行，在视觉和/或身体区域增加身体信息时，大部分被打断；观察别人的动作或身体的移动。总的来说，这项工作概述了从记忆，体现和行动感知框架记忆多方面刺激（即身体与任意刺激）有关的那些过程。