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Spatial and Motor Aspects in the "Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect".

ABSTRACT: The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is often taken as supporting the fundamental role of the motor system in understanding sentences that describe actions. This effect would be related to an internal "simulation," i.e., the reactivation of past perceptual and motor experiences. However, it is not easy to establish whether this simulation predominantly involves spatial imagery or motor anticipation. In the classical ACE experiments, where a real motor response is required, the direction and motor representations are mixed. In order to disentangle spatial and motor aspects involved in the ACE, we performed six experiments in different conditions, where the motor component was always reduced, asking participants to judge the sensibility of sentences by moving a mouse, thus requiring a purely spatial representation, compatible with nonmotor interpretations. In addition, our experiments had the purpose of taking into account the possible confusion of effects of practice and of compatibility (i.e., differences in reaction times simultaneously coming from block order and opposite motion conditions). Also, in contrast to the usual paradigm, we included no-transfer filler sentences in the analysis. The ACE was not found in any experiment, a result that failed to support the idea that the ACE could be related to a simulation where spatial aspects rather than motor ones prevail. Strong practice effects were always found and were carved out from results. A surprising effect was that no-transfer sentences were processed much slower than others, perhaps revealing a sort of participants' awareness of the structure of stimuli, i.e., their finding that some of them involved motion and others did not. The relevance of these outcomes for the embodiment theory is discussed.

SUBMITTER: Greco A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8062728 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundBehavioral studies have provided evidence for an action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) that suggests a coupling of motor mechanisms and action-sentence comprehension. When both processes are concurrent, the action sentence primes the actual movement, and simultaneously, the action affects comprehension. The aim of the present study was to investigate brain markers of bidirectional impact of language comprehension and motor processes.Methodology/principal findingsParticipants listened to sentences describing an action that involved an open hand, a closed hand, or no manual action. Each participant was asked to press a button to indicate his/her understanding of the sentence. Each participant was assigned a hand-shape, either closed or open, which had to be used to activate the button. There were two groups (depending on the assigned hand-shape) and three categories (compatible, incompatible and neutral) defined according to the compatibility between the response and the sentence. ACEs were found in both groups. Brain markers of semantic processing exhibited an N400-like component around the Cz electrode position. This component distinguishes between compatible and incompatible, with a greater negative deflection for incompatible. Motor response elicited a motor potential (MP) and a re-afferent potential (RAP), which are both enhanced in the compatible condition.Conclusions/significanceThe present findings provide the first ACE cortical measurements of semantic processing and the motor response. N400-like effects suggest that incompatibility with motor processes interferes in sentence comprehension in a semantic fashion. Modulation of motor potentials (MP and RAP) revealed a multimodal semantic facilitation of the motor response. Both results provide neural evidence of an action-sentence bidirectional relationship. Our results suggest that ACE is not an epiphenomenal post-sentence comprehension process. In contrast, motor-language integration occurring during the verb onset supports a genuine and ongoing brain motor-language interaction.

Project description:Magnitude processing is of great interest to researchers because it requires integration of quantity related information in memory regardless of whether the focus is numerical or non-numerical magnitudes. The previous work has suggested an interplay between pre-existing semantic information about number-space relationship in processes of encoding and recall. Investigation of the compatibility between physical stimulus size - spatial position and false recognition may provide valuable information about the cognitive representation of non-numerical magnitudes. Therefore, we applied a false memory procedure to a series of non-numerical stimulus pairs. Three versions of the pairs were used: big-right (a big character on the right/a small character on the left), big-left (a big character on the left/a small character on the right), and equal-sized (an equal sized character on each side). In the first phase, participants (N = 100) received 27 pairs, with nine pairs from each experimental condition. In the second phase, nine pairs from each of three stimulus categories were presented: (1) original pairs that were presented in the first phase, (2) mirrored pairs that were horizontally flipped versions of the pairs presented in the first phase, and (3) novel pairs that had not been presented before. The participants were instructed to press "YES" for the pairs that they remembered seeing before and to press "NO" for the pairs that they did not remember from the first phase. The results indicated that the participants made more false-alarm responses by responding "yes" to the pairs with the bigger one on the right. Moreover, they responded to the previously seen figures with the big one on the right faster compared to their distracting counterparts. The study provided evidence for the relationship between stimulus physical size and how they processed spatially by employing a false memory procedure. We offered a size-space compatibility account based on the congruency between the short- and long-term associations which produce local compatibilities. Accordingly, the compatible stimuli in the learning phase might be responsible for the interference, reflecting a possible short-term interference effect on congruency between the short- and long-term associations. Clearly, future research is required to test this speculative position.

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Spatial and Motor Aspects in the "Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect".

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