Dataset Information

Visual attention during spatial language comprehension.

ABSTRACT: Spatial terms such as "above", "in front of", and "on the left of" are all essential for describing the location of one object relative to another object in everyday communication. Apprehending such spatial relations involves relating linguistic to object representations by means of attention. This requires at least one attentional shift, and models such as the Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) predict the direction of that attention shift, from the sausage to the box for spatial utterances such as "The box is above the sausage". To the extent that this prediction generalizes to overt gaze shifts, a listener's visual attention should shift from the sausage to the box. However, listeners tend to rapidly look at referents in their order of mention and even anticipate them based on linguistic cues, a behavior that predicts a converse attentional shift from the box to the sausage. Four eye-tracking experiments assessed the role of overt attention in spatial language comprehension by examining to which extent visual attention is guided by words in the utterance and to which extent it also shifts "against the grain" of the unfolding sentence. The outcome suggests that comprehenders' visual attention is predominantly guided by their interpretation of the spatial description. Visual shifts against the grain occurred only when comprehenders had some extra time, and their absence did not affect comprehension accuracy. However, the timing of this reverse gaze shift on a trial correlated with that trial's verification time. Thus, while the timing of these gaze shifts is subtly related to the verification time, their presence is not necessary for successful verification of spatial relations.

SUBMITTER: Burigo M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4301815 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Visual attention during spatial language comprehension.

Burigo Michele M Knoeferle Pia P

PloS one 20150121 1

Spatial terms such as "above", "in front of", and "on the left of" are all essential for describing the location of one object relative to another object in everyday communication. Apprehending such spatial relations involves relating linguistic to object representations by means of attention. This requires at least one attentional shift, and models such as the Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) predict the direction of that attention shift, from the sausage to the box for spatial utterances such as " ...[more]

PMID: 25607540

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Project description:UnlabelledWe do not fully understand how behavioral state modulates the processing and transmission of sensory signals. Here, we studied the cortical representation of the retinal image in mice that spontaneously switched between a state of rest and a constricted pupil, and one of active locomotion and a dilated pupil, indicative of heightened attention. We measured the selectivity of neurons in primary visual cortex for orientation and spatial frequency, as well as their response gain, in these two behavioral states. Consistent with prior studies, we found that preferred orientation and spatial frequency remained invariant across states, whereas response gain increased during locomotion relative to rest. Surprisingly, relative gain, defined as the ratio between the gain during locomotion and the gain during rest, was not uniform across the population. Cells tuned to high spatial frequencies showed larger relative gain compared with those tuned to lower spatial frequencies. The preferential enhancement of high-spatial-frequency information was also reflected in our ability to decode the stimulus from population activity. Finally, we show that changes in gain originate from shifts in the operating point of neurons along a spiking nonlinearity as a function of behavioral state. Differences in the relative gain experienced by neurons with high and low spatial frequencies are due to corresponding differences in how these cells shift their operating points between behavioral states.Significance statementHow behavioral state modulates the processing and transmission of sensory signals remains poorly understood. Here, we show that the mean firing rate and neuronal gain increase during locomotion as a result in a shift of the operating point of neurons. We define relative gain as the ratio between the gain of neurons during locomotion and rest. Interestingly, relative gain is higher in cells with preferences for higher spatial frequencies than those with low-spatial-frequency selectivity. This means that, during a state of locomotion and heightened attention, the population activity in primary visual cortex can support better spatial acuity, a phenomenon that parallels the improved spatial resolution observed in human subjects during the allocation of spatial attention.

Project description:Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we identified cortical regions mediating interpretive processes that take place during language comprehension. We manipulated participants' interpretation of texts by asking them to focus on action-, space-, or time-related features while listening to identical short stories. We identify several cortical regions where activity varied significantly in response to this attention manipulation, even though the content being processed was exactly the same. Activity in the posterior and anterior sections of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which are thought to have different sensitivities to high-level language processing, was modulated by the listeners' attentional focus, but in ways that were quite different. The posterior left IFG (Pars Opercularis) showed different activity levels for the three conditions. However, a population coding analysis demonstrated similar distributions of activity across conditions. This suggests that while the gain of the response in the Pars Opercularis was modulated, its core organization was relatively invariant across the experimental conditions. In the anterior left IFG (Pars Triangularis), the analysis of population codes revealed different activity patterns between conditions: there was little similarity between activity during time-attention and action- and space-attention, however there were similar activity patterns while attending to space and action information. In addition, both the left superior temporal gyrus and sulcus showed greater activity in the space and action attention conditions when contrasted with time attention. We discuss these findings in light of work on the role of left IFG in processing semantic information in language, and in light of theories suggesting that temporal information in language is processed in the brain using similar mechanisms as spatial information. Our findings suggest that a substantial source of variance in neural activity during language comprehension emerges from the internally-driven, information-seeking preferences of listeners rather than the syntactic or semantic properties of a text.

Dataset Information

Visual attention during spatial language comprehension.

Publications

Visual attention during spatial language comprehension.

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