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The activation of modality-specific representations during discourse processing.

ABSTRACT: Previous research has shown that readers generate mental images of events. Most studies have investigated imagery during the reading of short texts, which also included explicit judgment tasks. In two fMRI studies, we assessed whether modality-specific imagery occurs during naturalistic, discourse comprehension. We identified clauses in the texts that elicited auditory, motor, or visual imagery. In both studies, reading motor imagery clauses was associated with increases in activity in left postcentral and precentral sulci, and reading auditory imagery clauses was associated with increases in left superior temporal gyrus and perisylvian language-related regions. Study 2 compared presentation of connected discourse to a condition in which unconnected sentences were presented, preventing the establishment of global coherence. Sensorimotor imagery was strongest when readers were able to generate a globally coherent discourse representation. Overall, these results suggest that modality-specific imagery occurs during discourse comprehension and it is dependent on the development of discourse-level representations.

SUBMITTER: Kurby CA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4318524 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The activation of modality-specific representations during discourse processing.

Kurby Christopher A CA Zacks Jeffrey M JM

Brain and language 20130808 3

Previous research has shown that readers generate mental images of events. Most studies have investigated imagery during the reading of short texts, which also included explicit judgment tasks. In two fMRI studies, we assessed whether modality-specific imagery occurs during naturalistic, discourse comprehension. We identified clauses in the texts that elicited auditory, motor, or visual imagery. In both studies, reading motor imagery clauses was associated with increases in activity in left post ...[more]

PMID: 23933473

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Project description:A central question in affective science and one that is relevant for its clinical applications is how emotions provided by different stimuli are experienced and represented in the brain. Following the traditional view emotional signals are recognized with the help of emotion concepts that are typically used in descriptions of mental states and emotional experiences, irrespective of the sensory modality. This perspective motivated the search for abstract representations of emotions in the brain, shared across variations in stimulus type (face, body, voice) and sensory origin (visual, auditory). On the other hand, emotion signals like for example an aggressive gesture, trigger rapid automatic behavioral responses and this may take place before or independently of full abstract representation of the emotion. This pleads in favor specific emotion signals that may trigger rapid adaptative behavior only by mobilizing modality and stimulus specific brain representations without relying on higher order abstract emotion categories. To test this hypothesis, we presented participants with naturalistic dynamic emotion expressions of the face, the whole body, or the voice in a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) study. To focus on automatic emotion processing and sidestep explicit concept-based emotion recognition, participants performed an unrelated target detection task presented in a different sensory modality than the stimulus. By using multivariate analyses to assess neural activity patterns in response to the different stimulus types, we reveal a stimulus category and modality specific brain organization of affective signals. Our findings are consistent with the notion that under ecological conditions emotion expressions of the face, body and voice may have different functional roles in triggering rapid adaptive behavior, even if when viewed from an abstract conceptual vantage point, they may all exemplify the same emotion. This has implications for a neuroethologically grounded emotion research program that should start from detailed behavioral observations of how face, body, and voice expressions function in naturalistic contexts.

Project description:Language comprehension requires access to stored knowledge and the ability to combine knowledge in new, meaningful ways. Previous work has shown that processing linguistically more complex expressions ('Texas cattle rancher' vs. 'rancher') leads to slow-downs in reading during initial processing, possibly reflecting effort in combining information. Conversely, when this information must subsequently be retrieved (as in filler-gap constructions), processing is facilitated for more complex expressions, possibly because more semantic cues are available during retrieval. To follow up on this hypothesis, we tested whether information distributed across a short discourse can similarly provide effective cues for retrieval. Participants read texts introducing two referents (e.g., two senators), one of whom was described in greater detail than the other (e.g., 'The Democrat had voted for one of the senators, and the Republican had voted for the other, a man from Ohio who was running for president'). The final sentence (e.g., 'The senator who the {Republican/Democrat}had voted for…') contained a relative clause picking out either the Many-Cue referent (with 'Republican') or the One-Cue referent (with 'Democrat'). We predicted facilitated retrieval (faster reading times) for the Many-Cue condition at the verb region ('had voted for'), where readers could understand that 'The senator' is the object of the verb. As predicted, this pattern was observed at the retrieval region and continued throughout the rest of the sentence. Participants also completed the Author/Magazine Recognition Tests (ART/MRT; Stanovich and West, 1989), providing a proxy for world knowledge. Since higher ART/MRT scores may index (a) greater experience accessing relevant knowledge and/or (b) richer/more highly structured representations in semantic memory, we predicted it would be positively associated with effects of elaboration on retrieval. We did not observe the predicted interaction between ART/MRT scores and Cue condition at the retrieval region, though ART/MRT interacted with Cue condition in other locations in the sentence. In sum, we found that providing more elaborative information over the course of a text can facilitate retrieval for referents, consistent with a framework in which referential elaboration over a discourse and not just local linguistic information directly impacts information retrieval during sentence processing.

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The activation of modality-specific representations during discourse processing.

Publications

The activation of modality-specific representations during discourse processing.

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