This chapter discusses the contributions of functional imaging to our understanding of how action and tool concepts are represented and processed in the human brain. It is framed within the feature-based account of semantic memory. This approach assumes that conceptual knowledge is represented in a large distributed network, indexing a range of semantic features. Neurophysiological studies in non-human primates have suggested that the frontoparietal circuitry may play a role in visuomotor transformations and action matching, imitation and understanding. Studies of action observation and semantic retrieval provide converging evidence that left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LPMT) activation is commonly increased for hand manipulation and whole-body movements. The chapter revisits several themes that have emerged from functional imaging studies of tool and action processing. It evaluates the positive evidence for the feature-based account of semantic memory, and concludes by highlighting future directions to investigate the neural mechanisms of tool and action processing.