scholarly journals Different neural networks for conceptual retrieval in sighted and blind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Bottini ◽  
Stefania Ferraro ◽  
Anna Nigri ◽  
Valeria Cuccarini ◽  
Maria Grazia Bruzzone ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Knowledge ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Visual Deprivation ◽  
Perceptual Similarity ◽  
Retrieval Task ◽  
Repetition Suppression ◽  
The World ◽  
Neural Bases ◽  
Blind Individuals

AbstractWe investigated the experiential bases of knowledge by asking whether people that perceive the world in a different way also show a different neurobiology of concepts. We characterized the brain activity of early-blind and sighted individuals during a conceptual retrieval task in which participants rated the perceptual similarity between color and action concepts evoked by spoken words. Adaptation analysis showed that word-pairs referring to perceptually similar colors (e.g., red-orange) or actions (e.g., run-jump) led to repetition-suppression in occipital visual regions in the sighted, regions that are known to encode visual features of objects and events, independently of their category. Early blind showed instead adaptation for similar concepts in language-related regions, but not in occipital cortices. Further analysis contrasting the two categories (color and action), independently of item similarity, activated category-sensitive regions in the pMTG (for actions) and the precuneus (for color) in both sighted and blind. These two regions, however, showed a different connectivity profile as a function of visual deprivation, increasing task-dependent connectivity with reorganized occipital regions in the early blind. Overall, our results show that visual deprivation changes the neural bases of conceptual retrieval, which is partially grounded in sensorimotor experience.Significance StatementDo people with different sensory experience conceive the world differently? We tested whether conceptual knowledge builds on sensory experience by looking at the neurobiology of concepts in early blind individuals. Participants in fMRI heard pairs of words referring to colors (e.g., green-blue) or actions (e.g., jump-run) and rated their perceptual similarity. Perceptual similarity of colors and actions was represented in occipital visual regions in the sighted, but in language-related regions in the blind. Occipital regions in the blind, albeit not encoding perceptual similarity, were however recruited during conceptual retrieval, working in concert with classic semantic hubs such as the Precuneus and the lpMTG. Overall, visual deprivation changes the neural bases of conceptual processing, which is partially grounded in sensorimotor experience.

scholarly journals The influence of object-colour knowledge on emerging object representations in the brain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lina Teichmann ◽  
Genevieve L. Quek ◽  
Amanda K. Robinson ◽  
Tijl Grootswagers ◽  
Thomas A. Carlson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Conceptual Knowledge ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Object Representations ◽  
Complex Objects ◽  
Object Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Object Features

AbstractThe ability to rapidly and accurately recognise complex objects is a crucial function of the human visual system. To recognise an object, we need to bind incoming visual features such as colour and form together into cohesive neural representations and integrate these with our pre-existing knowledge about the world. For some objects, typical colour is a central feature for recognition; for example, a banana is typically yellow. Here, we applied multivariate pattern analysis on time-resolved neuroimaging (magnetoencephalography) data to examine how object-colour knowledge affects emerging object representations over time. Our results from 20 participants (11 female) show that the typicality of object-colour combinations influences object representations, although not at the initial stages of object and colour processing. We find evidence that colour decoding peaks later for atypical object-colour combinations in comparison to typical object-colour combinations, illustrating the interplay between processing incoming object features and stored object-knowledge. Taken together, these results provide new insights into the integration of incoming visual information with existing conceptual object knowledge.Significance StatementTo recognise objects, we have to be able to bind object features such as colour and shape into one coherent representation and compare it to stored object knowledge. The magnetoencephalography data presented here provide novel insights about the integration of incoming visual information with our knowledge about the world. Using colour as a model to understand the interaction between seeing and knowing, we show that there is a unique pattern of brain activity for congruently coloured objects (e.g., a yellow banana) relative to incongruently coloured objects (e.g., a red banana). This effect of object-colour knowledge only occurs after single object features are processed, demonstrating that conceptual knowledge is accessed relatively late in the visual processing hierarchy.

Culture and the plasticity of perception

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lifshitz ◽  
T. M. Luhrmann
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
The World

Abstract Culture shapes our basic sensory experience of the world. This is particularly striking in the study of religion and psychosis, where we and others have shown that cultural context determines both the structure and content of hallucination-like events. The cultural shaping of hallucinations may provide a rich case-study for linking cultural learning with emerging prediction-based models of perception.

Frontal Brain Activity during Episodic and Semantic Retrieval: Insights from Event-Related Potentials

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 598-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charan Ranganath ◽  
Ken A. Paller
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Memory Retrieval ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Novelty Detection ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Episodic Retrieval ◽  
Semantic Retrieval ◽  
Retrieval Task ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
The Right

Previous neuropsychological and neuroimaging results have implicated the prefrontal cortex in memory retrieval, although its precise role is unclear. In the present study, we examined patterns of brain electrical activity during retrieval of episodic and semantic memories. In the episodic retrieval task, participants retrieved autobiographical memories in response to event cues. In the semantic retrieval task, participants generated exemplars in response to category cues. Novel sounds presented intermittently during memory retrieval elicited a series of brain potentials including one identifiable as the P3a potential. Based on prior research linking P3a with novelty detection and with the frontal lobes, we predicted that P3a would be reduced to the extent that novelty detection and memory retrieval interfere with each other. Results during episodic and semantic retrieval tasks were compared to results during a task in which subjects attended to the auditory stimuli. P3a amplitudes were reduced during episodic retrieval, particularly at right lateral frontal scalp locations. A similar but less lateralized pattern of frontal P3a reduction was observed during semantic retrieval. These findings support the notion that the right prefrontal cortex is engaged in the service of memory retrieval, particularly for episodic memories.

scholarly journals Body Meets Space. Space Becomes Dress.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Lipsit
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Layer By Layer ◽  
The World ◽  
Soft Architecture

Forming. Shifting. Shaping. The envelope of one’s physiological body extends outwards in multiple shells, layer by layer. The versions of this envelope exist in the interstitial moment between clothing and architecture; ever forming and being formed, they shift and shape the circulation and happenings of the body on one side and the world on the other. The study of garments lends architecture recognition of various visible and invisible forces that create space and envelope. When space becomes dress, body specificity and movement is emphasized, and the geometries of the physiological body and what it means to experience space as an individual becomes primary, achieving a qualitative, sensory experience extending from the powers of kinaesthetic sense. Oscillating between scales and acts of making, model experimentation invents new ways to conceive and create architecture — a soft architecture finds itself operating here: on the liminal edge of body, envelope, and space

Understanding as Living

2019 ◽  
pp. 7-53
Author(s):  
James W. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Laboratory Research ◽  
Interactive System ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Network Studies ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Religious Understanding

Drawing upon clinical psychoanalysis and laboratory research, this chapter develops an “embodied-relational” epistemology. The chapter reviews major research findings on the ways embodiment influences the cognitive processes by which we understand ourselves and the world. It also reviews current neuro-network studies whose findings imply the brain can be understood as a single, interactive system and not simply a collection of relatively autonomous domains. The emphasis here is on the brain’s complexity, integration, and a certain degree of openness. Sensory experience is understood as an active, not passive process, involving an intimate interconnection between self and world. The role of proprioception, as well as the five basic senses, is analyzed. The implications of such research findings for human understanding, and especially religious understanding, are elaborated.

Inferential Anti-skepticism about Perception

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-56
Author(s):  
Michael Bergmann
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Skeptical Hypothesis ◽  
The World ◽  
Sensory Evidence ◽  
Priori Knowledge

This chapter examines multiple kinds of deductive and nondeductive anti-skeptical arguments from our sensory experience to the likely truth of our perceptual beliefs based on that evidence and finds them all wanting. In the first two sections, it briefly considers deductive anti-skeptical arguments (of the theological and transcendental variety), inductive anti-skeptical arguments from past correlations of sensory experience with true perceptual beliefs based on it, and anti-skeptical arguments based on a priori knowledge of probabilistic principles saying that our sensory evidence for our perceptual beliefs makes probable the truth of those beliefs. In the final three sections, the focus turns to abductive or inference to the best explanation (IBE) arguments, which are currently the most popular anti-skeptical arguments. IBE anti-skeptical arguments conclude that our sensory experience, or some feature of it, is best explained by the truth of our perceptual beliefs. These three sections argue that we lack good reasons for thinking that our sensory experience is better explained by a Standard Hypothesis (saying that the world is approximately as it seems) than by a skeptical hypothesis, such as the hypothesis that a deceptive demon wants to mislead us into falsely believing the world is as it seems.

scholarly journals Measuring shared responses across subjects using intersubject correlation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel A Nastase ◽  
Valeria Gazzola ◽  
Uri Hasson ◽  
Christian Keysers
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
Response Model ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
Spatially Distributed ◽  
Shared Information ◽  
Network Estimation ◽  
Methodological Considerations

Abstract Our capacity to jointly represent information about the world underpins our social experience. By leveraging one individual’s brain activity to model another’s, we can measure shared information across brains—even in dynamic, naturalistic scenarios where an explicit response model may be unobtainable. Introducing experimental manipulations allows us to measure, for example, shared responses between speakers and listeners or between perception and recall. In this tutorial, we develop the logic of intersubject correlation (ISC) analysis and discuss the family of neuroscientific questions that stem from this approach. We also extend this logic to spatially distributed response patterns and functional network estimation. We provide a thorough and accessible treatment of methodological considerations specific to ISC analysis and outline best practices.

scholarly journals The rhythmic nature of visual perception

2018 ◽  
Vol 119 (4) ◽  
pp. 1251-1253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph F. Helfrich
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Oculomotor System ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Discrete Sampling ◽  
The Neural Network ◽  
The World ◽  
Oscillatory Brain Activity

Our continuous perception of the world could be the result of discrete sampling, where individual snapshots are seamlessly fused into a coherent stream. It has been argued that endogenous oscillatory brain activity could provide the functional substrate of cortical rhythmic sampling. A new study demonstrates that cortical rhythmic sampling is tightly linked to the oculomotor system, thus providing a novel perspective on the neural network underlying top-down guided visual perception.

Situating Feminist Theologies Phenomenologically

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heike Peckruhn
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

Chapter 2 investigates the manner in which feminist theologies employ experience as a source for theology, particularly sensory experience. It highlights scholarly work that seeks to overcome body-mind dualisms by appealing to perception and analyzes where and how these attempts fall short. Perception in the theological works surveyed is either conceived in an empiricist or intellectualist fashion, which upholds the very body-mind dualism sought to move beyond. The chapter proposes that we are our bodies, and we experience the world as we are in the world through our bodies, as body-subjects. This leaves no room for an ontological separation of the subject “I” and the body of the subject.

scholarly journals Human Development XI: The Structure of the Cerebral Cortex. Are There Really Modules in the Brain?

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1922-1929 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyge Dahl Hermansen ◽  
Søren Ventegodt ◽  
Isack Kandel
Keyword(s):  
Cerebral Cortex ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Sensory Cortex ◽  
Biological Information ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Primary Sensory Cortex ◽  
Sensory Maps ◽  
The World ◽  
The Brain ◽  
The Universe

The structure of human consciousness is thought to be closely connected to the structure of cerebral cortex. One of the most appreciated concepts in this regard is the Szanthagothei model of a modular building of neo-cortex. The modules are believed to organize brain activity pretty much like a computer. We looked at examples in the literature and argue that there is no significant evidence that supports Szanthagothei's model. We discuss the use of the limited genetic information, the corticocortical afferents termination and the columns in primary sensory cortex as arguments for the existence of the cortex-module. Further, we discuss the results of experiments with Luminization Microscopy (LM) colouration of myalinized fibres, in which vertical bundles of afferent/efferent fibres that could support the cortex module are identified. We conclude that sensory maps seem not to be an expression for simple specific connectivity, but rather to be functional defined. We also conclude that evidence for the existence of the postulated module or column does not exist in the discussed material. This opens up for an important discussion of the brain as functionally directed by biological information (information-directed self-organisation), and for consciousness being closely linked to the structure of the universe at large. Consciousness is thus not a local phenomena limited to the brain, but a much more global phenomena connected to the wholeness of the world.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document