Action Sentences Activate Sensory Motor Regions in the Brain Independently of Their Status of Reality

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (7) ◽  
pp. 1363-1376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel de Vega ◽  
Inmaculada León ◽  
Juan A. Hernández ◽  
Mitchell Valdés ◽  
Iván Padrón ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Superior Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Extrastriate Body Area ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Concrete Action ◽  
One Step ◽  
Linguistic Structures ◽  
The Brain

Some studies have reported that understanding concrete action-related words and sentences elicits activations of motor areas in the brain. The present fMRI study goes one step further by testing whether this is also the case for comprehension of nonfactual statements. Three linguistic structures were used (factuals, counterfactuals, and negations), referring either to actions or, as a control condition, to visual events. The results showed that action sentences elicited stronger activations than visual sentences in the SMA, extending to the primary motor area, as well as in regions generally associated with the planning and understanding of actions (left superior temporal gyrus, left and right supramarginal gyri). Also, we found stronger activations for action sentences than for visual sentences in the extrastriate body area, a region involved in the visual processing of human body movements. These action-related effects occurred not only in factuals but also in negations and counterfactuals, suggesting that brain regions involved in action understanding and planning are activated by default even when the actions are described as hypothetical or as not happening. Moreover, some of these regions overlapped with those activated during the observation of action videos, indicating that the act of understanding action language and that of observing real actions share neural networks. These results support the claim that embodied representations of linguistic meaning are important even in abstract linguistic contexts.

scholarly journals C-19 An fMRI Study of Age-Associated Changes in Basic Visual Discrimination

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 1048-1048
Author(s):  
T Seider ◽  
E Porges ◽  
A Woods ◽  
R Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Visual Discrimination ◽  
Community Sample ◽  
Visual Assessment ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Brain Response ◽  
Match To Sample ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Perceptual Skill ◽  
Cluster Level

Abstract Objective The study was conducted to determine age-associated changes in functional brain response, measured with fMRI, during visual discrimination with regard to three elementary components of visual perception: shape, location, and velocity. A secondary aim was to validate the method used to isolate the hypothesized brain regions associated with these perceptual functions. Method Items from the Visual Assessment Battery (VAB), a simultaneous match-to-sample task, assessed visual discrimination in 40 healthy adults during fMRI. Participants were aged 51-91 and recruited from a larger community sample for a study on normal aging. The tasks were designed to isolate neural recruitment during discrimination of either location, shape, or velocity by using tasks that were identical aside from the perceptual skill required to complete them. Results The Location task uniquely activated the dorsal visual processing stream, the Shape task the ventral stream, and the Velocity task V5/MT. Greater age was associated with greater neural recruitment, particularly in frontal areas (uncorrected voxel-level p < .001, family-wise error cluster-level p□.05). Conclusions Results validated the specialization of brain regions for spatial, perceptual, and movement discriminations and the use of the VAB to assess functioning localized to these regions. Anterior neural recruitment during visual discrimination increases with age.

scholarly journals Effect of Brightness of Visual Stimuli on EEG Signals

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kübra Eroğlu ◽  
Temel Kayıkçıoğlu ◽  
Onur Osman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Time Window ◽  
Time Windows ◽  
Visual Stimuli ◽  
Average Power ◽  
Power Spectra ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Behavioral Data ◽  
Brain Responses ◽  
The Brain

The aim of this study was to examine brightness effect, which is the perceptual property of visual stimuli, on brain responses obtained during visual processing of these stimuli. For this purpose, brain responses of the brain to changes in brightness were explored comparatively using different emotional images (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral) with different luminance levels. Moreover, electroencephalography recordings from 12 different electrode sites of 31 healthy participants were used. The power spectra obtained from the analysis of the recordings using short time Fourier transform were analyzed, and a statistical analysis was performed on features extracted from these power spectra. Statistical findings obtained from electrophysiological data were compared with those obtained from behavioral data. The results showed that the brightness of visual stimuli affected the power of brain responses depending on frequency, time and location. According to the statistically verified findings, the distinctive effect of brightness occurred in the parietal and occipital regions for all the three types of stimuli. Accordingly, the increase in the brightness of pleasant and neutral images increased the average power of responses in the parietal and occipital regions whereas the increase in the brightness of unpleasant images decreased the average power of responses in these regions. However, the increase in brightness for all the three types of stimuli reduced the average power of frontal and central region responses (except for 100-300 ms time window for unpleasant stimuli). The statistical results obtained for unpleasant images were found to be in accordance with the behavioral data. The results also revealed that the brightness of visual stimuli could be represented by changing the activity power of the brain cortex. The main contribution of this research was to comprehensively examine brightness effect on brain activity for images with different emotional content and different frequency bands at different time windows of visual processing for different brain regions. The findings emphasized that the brightness of visual stimuli should be viewed as an important parameter in studies using emotional image techniques such as image classification, emotion evaluation and neuro-marketing.

Sensitivity to Faces with Typical and Atypical Part Configurations within Regions of the Face-processing Network: An fMRI Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (7) ◽  
pp. 963-972 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew D. Engell ◽  
Na Yeon Kim ◽  
Gregory McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Face Processing ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Face Area ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
The Face ◽  
Occipital Face Area ◽  
Typical Configuration ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Processing Network

Perception of faces has been shown to engage a domain-specific set of brain regions, including the occipital face area (OFA) and the fusiform face area (FFA). It is commonly held that the OFA is responsible for the detection of faces in the environment, whereas the FFA is responsible for processing the identity of the face. However, an alternative model posits that the FFA is responsible for face detection and subsequently recruits the OFA to analyze the face parts in the service of identification. An essential prediction of the former model is that the OFA is not sensitive to the arrangement of internal face parts. In the current fMRI study, we test the sensitivity of the OFA and FFA to the configuration of face parts. Participants were shown faces in which the internal parts were presented in a typical configuration (two eyes above a nose above a mouth) or in an atypical configuration (the locations of individual parts were shuffled within the face outline). Perception of the atypical faces evoked a significantly larger response than typical faces in the OFA and in a wide swath of the surrounding posterior occipitotemporal cortices. Surprisingly, typical faces did not evoke a significantly larger response than atypical faces anywhere in the brain, including the FFA (although some subthreshold differences were observed). We propose that face processing in the FFA results in inhibitory sculpting of activation in the OFA, which accounts for this region's weaker response to typical than to atypical configurations.

scholarly journals Hierarchy in sensory processing reflected by innervation balance on cortical interneurons

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (20) ◽  
pp. eabf5676
Author(s):  
Guofen Ma ◽  
Yanmei Liu ◽  
Lizhao Wang ◽  
Zhongyi Xiao ◽  
Kun Song ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Long Range ◽  
Sensory Processing ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Brain Areas ◽  
Local Interneurons ◽  
Cortical Interneurons ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Virus Tracing ◽  
The Brain

Sensory processing is subjected to modulation by behavioral contexts that are often mediated by long-range inputs to cortical interneurons, but their selectivity to different types of interneurons remains largely unknown. Using rabies-virus tracing and optogenetics-assisted recording, we analyzed the long-range connections to various brain regions along the hierarchy of visual processing, including primary visual cortex, medial association cortices, and frontal cortices. We found that hierarchical corticocortical and thalamocortical connectivity is reflected by the relative weights of inputs to parvalbumin-positive (PV+) and vasoactive intestinal peptide–positive (VIP+) neurons within the conserved local circuit motif, with bottom-up and top-down inputs preferring PV+ and VIP+ neurons, respectively. Our algorithms based on innervation weights for these two types of local interneurons generated testable predictions of the hierarchical position of many brain areas. These results support the notion that preferential long-range inputs to specific local interneurons are essential for the hierarchical information flow in the brain.

scholarly journals Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 983
Author(s):  
Xin Wang ◽  
Shiwen Feng ◽  
Tongquan Zhou ◽  
Renyu Wang ◽  
Guowei Wu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Superior Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Syntactic Processing ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Intransitive Verbs ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Passive Verbs

According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis, intransitive verbs are divided into unaccusative and unergative ones based on the distinction of their syntactic properties, which has been proved by previous theoretical and empirical evidence. However, debate has been raised regarding whether intransitive verbs in Mandarin Chinese can be split into unaccusative and unergative ones syntactically. To analyze this theoretical controversy, the present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural processing of deep unaccusative, unergative sentences, and passive sentences (derived structures undergoing a syntactic movement) in Mandarin Chinese. The results revealed no significant difference in the neural processing of deep unaccusative and unergative sentences, and the comparisons between passive sentences and the other sentence types revealed activation in the left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG) and the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG). These findings indicate that the syntactic processing of unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin Chinese is highly similar but different from that of passive verbs, which suggests that deep unaccusative and unergative sentences in Mandarin Chinese are both base-generated structures and that there is no syntactic distinction between unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin Chinese.

scholarly journals Mean deviation based identification of activated voxels from time-series fMRI data of schizophrenia patients

F1000Research ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1615 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indranath Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Superior Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Medical Intervention ◽  
Fmri Data ◽  
Mean Deviation ◽  
Functional Changes ◽  
Statistical Measures ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Over Time

Background: Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness affecting different regions of the brain, which causes symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is the most popular technique to study the functional activation patterns of the brain. The fMRI data is four-dimensional, composed of 3D brain images over time. Each voxel of the 3D brain volume is associated with a time series of signal intensity values. This study aimed to identify the distinct voxels from time-series fMRI data that show high functional activation during a task. Methods: In this study, a novel mean-deviation based approach was applied to time-series fMRI data of 34 schizophrenia patients and 34 healthy subjects. The statistical measures such as mean and median were used to find the functional changes in each voxel over time. The voxels that show significant changes for each subject were selected and thus used as the feature set during the classification of schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. Results: The proposed approach identifies a set of relevant voxels that are used to distinguish between healthy and schizophrenia subjects with high classification accuracy. The study shows functional changes in brain regions such as superior frontal gyrus, cuneus, medial frontal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. Conclusions: This work describes a simple yet novel feature selection algorithm for time-series fMRI data to identify the activated brain voxels that are generally affected in schizophrenia. The brain regions identified in this study may further help clinicians to understand the illness for better medical intervention. It may be possible to explore the approach to fMRI data of other psychological disorders.

An fMRI Study on the Differences in the Brain Regions Activated by an Identical Audio-Visual Clip Using Major and Minor Key Arrangements

NeuroImage ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. S186
Author(s):  
J.H. Sohn ◽  
J.M. Lee ◽  
I.H. Kim ◽  
C.K. Lee ◽  
Y.K. Kim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Brain Regions ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
The Brain

A Parametric Approach to Orthographic Processing in the Brain: An fMRI Study

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. -A. Tagamets ◽  
Jared M. Novick ◽  
Maria L. Chalmers ◽  
Rhonda B. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Healthy Adult ◽  
Brain Activation ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Orthographic Processing ◽  
Matching Task ◽  
Parametric Approach ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Brain

Brain activation studies of orthographic stimuli typically start with the premise that different types of orthographic strings (e.g., words, pseudowords) differ from each other in discrete ways, which should be reflected in separate and distinct areas of brain activation. The present study starts from a different premise: Words, pseudowords, letterstrings, and false fonts vary systematically across a continuous dimension of familiarity to English readers. Using a one-back matching task to force encoding of the stimuli, the four types of stimuli were visually presented to healthy adult subjects while fMRI activations were obtained. Data analysis focused on parametric comparisons of fMRI activation sites. We did not find any region that was exclusively activated for real words. Rather, differences among these string types were mainly expressed as graded changes in the balance of activations among the regions. Our results suggests that there is a widespread network of brain regions that form a common network for the processing of all orthographic string types.

The Neural Basis of Personal Goal Processing When Envisioning Future Events

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. 1701-1713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnaud D'Argembeau ◽  
David Stawarczyk ◽  
Steve Majerus ◽  
Fabienne Collette ◽  
Martial Van der Linden ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Brain Regions ◽  
Posterior Cingulate Cortex ◽  
Personal Goals ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Event Simulation ◽  
Ventral Medial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Brain

Episodic future thinking allows humans to mentally simulate virtually infinite future possibilities, yet this device is fundamentally goal-directed and should not be equated with fantasizing or wishful thinking. The purpose of this fMRI study was to investigate the neural basis of such goal-directed processing during future-event simulation. Participants were scanned while they imagined future events that were related to their personal goals (personal future events) and future events that were plausible but unrelated to their personal goals (nonpersonal future events). Results showed that imaging personal future events elicited stronger activation in ventral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) compared to imaging nonpersonal future events. Moreover, these brain activations overlapped with activations elicited by a second task that assessed semantic self-knowledge (i.e., making judgments on one's own personality traits), suggesting that ventral MPFC and PCC mediate self-referential processing across different functional domains. It is suggested that these brain regions may support a collection of processes that evaluate, code, and contextualize the relevance of mental representations with regard to personal goals. The implications of these findings for the understanding of the function instantiated by the default network of the brain are also discussed.

scholarly journals Computational models of category-selective brain regions enable high-throughput tests of selectivity

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Apurva Ratan Murty ◽  
Pouya Bashivan ◽  
Alex Abate ◽  
James J. DiCarlo ◽  
Nancy Kanwisher
Keyword(s):  
Computational Models ◽  
Functional Organization ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Face Area ◽  
Extrastriate Body Area ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
The Brain

AbstractCortical regions apparently selective to faces, places, and bodies have provided important evidence for domain-specific theories of human cognition, development, and evolution. But claims of category selectivity are not quantitatively precise and remain vulnerable to empirical refutation. Here we develop artificial neural network-based encoding models that accurately predict the response to novel images in the fusiform face area, parahippocampal place area, and extrastriate body area, outperforming descriptive models and experts. We use these models to subject claims of category selectivity to strong tests, by screening for and synthesizing images predicted to produce high responses. We find that these high-response-predicted images are all unambiguous members of the hypothesized preferred category for each region. These results provide accurate, image-computable encoding models of each category-selective region, strengthen evidence for domain specificity in the brain, and point the way for future research characterizing the functional organization of the brain with unprecedented computational precision.

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