During the past few decades, research that has been done on action naming and recognition has used primarily static pictures stimuli. Through this approach, left premotor/prefrontal area have been identified as neural structures related to action words retrieval. On the other hand, studies have identified other neural structures that may play an important role in action naming performance. Such structures may be related to the comprehension of action stimuli. Recent imaging studies using static pictures stimuli have found activation of the medial temporal cortex, a structure that is related to the perception of movement. These findings suggest that in order to comprehend static action stimuli the subject has to generate a mental simulation of the movement that is implied on a picture. In addition, studies that have found dissociations between naming of static action pictures and naming of real (dynamic) actions suggest that different types of stimuli would require different degrees of effort from the subject to elicit a mental reconstruction of the observed action. this leads to the hypothesis that the degree to which subjects are required to generate mental action images in order to comprehend action stimuli will influence the types of neural structures needed to perform the tasks successfully.