Efforts for the Correct Comprehension of Deceitful and Ironic Communicative Intentions in Schizophrenia: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study on the Role of the Left Middle Temporal Gyrus.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Morese R
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9237627 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Ironic remarks are frequent in everyday language and represent an important form of social cognition. Increasing evidence indicates a deficit in comprehension in schizophrenia. Several models for defective comprehension have been proposed, including possible roles of the medial prefrontal lobe, default mode network, inferior frontal gyri, mirror neurons, right cerebral hemisphere and a possible mediating role of schizotypal personality traits. We investigated the neural correlates of irony comprehension in schizophrenia by using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In a prosody-free reading paradigm, 15 female patients with schizophrenia and 15 healthy female controls silently read ironic and literal text vignettes during fMRI. Each text vignette ended in either an ironic (n = 22) or literal (n = 22) statement. Ironic and literal text vignettes were matched for word frequency, length, grammatical complexity, and syntax. After fMRI, the subjects performed an off-line test to detect error rate. In this test, the subjects indicated by button press whether the target sentence has ironic, literal, or meaningless content. Schizotypal personality traits were assessed using the German version of the schizotypal personality questionnaire (SPQ). Patients with schizophrenia made significantly more errors than did the controls (correct answers, 85.3% vs. 96.3%) on a behavioural level. Patients showed attenuated blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) response during irony comprehension mainly in right hemisphere temporal regions (ironic>literal contrast) and in posterior medial prefrontal and left anterior insula regions (for ironic>visual baseline, but not for literal>visual baseline). In patients with schizophrenia, the parahippocampal gyrus showed increased activation. Across all subjects, BOLD response in the medial prefrontal area was negatively correlated with the SPQ score. These results highlight the role of the posterior medial prefrontal and right temporal regions in defective irony comprehension in schizophrenia and the mediating role of schizotypal personality traits.
| S-EPMC3769349 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) have a core impairment in the communicative-pragmatic domain, characterized by severe difficulties in correctly inferring the speaker's communicative intentions. While several studies have investigated pragmatic performance of patients with SCZ, little research has analyzed the errors committed in the comprehension of different communicative acts. The present research investigated error patterns in 24 patients with SCZ and 24 healthy controls (HC) during a task assessing the comprehension of different communicative acts, i.e., sincere, deceitful and ironic, and their relationship with the clinical features of SCZ. We used signal detection analysis to quantify participants' ability to correctly detect the speakers' communicative intention, i.e., sensitivity, and their tendency to wrongly perceive a communicative intention when not present, i.e., response bias. Further, we investigated the relationship between sensitivity and response bias, and the clinical features of the disorder, namely symptom severity, pharmacotherapy, and personal and social functioning. The results showed that the ability to infer the speaker's communicative intention is impaired in SCZ, as patients exhibited lower sensitivity, compared to HC, for all the pragmatic phenomena evaluated, i.e., sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. Further, we found that the sensitivity measure for irony was related to disorganized/concrete symptoms. Moreover, patients with SCZ showed a stronger response bias for deceitful communicative acts compared to HC: when committing errors, they tended to misattribute deceitful intentions more often than sincere and ironic ones. This tendency to misattribute deceitful communicative intentions may be related to the attributional bias characterizing the disorder.
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Project description:Zoological institutions often encourage cooperative interactions between keepers and animals so as to promote animals' welfare. One useful technique has been conditioning training, whereby animals learn to respond to keepers' requests, which facilitates a number of, otherwise sensitive, daily routines. As various media have been used to convey keepers' instructions, the question remains of which modality is best to promote mutual understanding. Here, we explored this question with two captive female orangutans. In the first experiment, we compared orangutans' understanding of previously acquired instructions when those were performed with verbal signals only, gazes only, gestures only, and when all those modalities were combined. Our results showed that gestures were sufficient for successful comprehension by these two apes. In the second experiment, we asked whether this preference could be driven by the non-arbitrary relationship that gestures bear to what they refer to, through iconicity or pointing. Our results revealed that neither iconicity nor pointing helped the subjects comprehend the keepers' instructions. Our results indicate a preference for instructions given through gestural signals in two captive female orangutans, although its cause remains elusive. Future practice may encourage the use of gestures in communication between keepers and orangutans in general or potentially other animals.
| S-EPMC6616600 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Our ability to understand others' communicative intentions in speech is key to successful social interaction. Indeed, misunderstanding an 'excuse me' as apology, while meant as criticism, may have important consequences. Recent behavioural studies have provided evidence that prosody, that is, vocal tone, is an important indicator for speakers' intentions. Using a novel audio-morphing paradigm, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neurocognitive mechanisms that allow listeners to 'read' speakers' intents from vocal prosodic patterns. Participants categorized prosodic expressions that gradually varied in their acoustics between criticism, doubt, and suggestion. Categorizing typical exemplars of the three intentions induced activations along the ventral auditory stream, complemented by amygdala and mentalizing system. These findings likely depict the stepwise conversion of external perceptual information into abstract prosodic categories and internal social semantic concepts, including the speaker's mental state. Ambiguous tokens, in turn, involved cingulo-opercular areas known to assist decision-making in case of conflicting cues. Auditory and decision-making processes were flexibly coupled with the amygdala, depending on prosodic typicality, indicating enhanced categorization efficiency of overtly relevant, meaningful prosodic signals. Altogether, the results point to a model in which auditory prosodic categorization and socio-inferential conceptualization cooperate to translate perceived vocal tone into a coherent representation of the speaker's intent.
| S-EPMC6022564 | biostudies-literature
Project description:OBJECTIVES: Schizophrenia is a highly disabling psychiatric disorder with a heterogeneous phenotypic appearance. We aimed to further the understanding of some of the underlying genetics of schizophrenia, using left superior temporal gyrus (STG) grey matter thickness reduction as an endophenoptype in a genome-wide association (GWA) study. METHODS: Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and genetic data of the Mind Clinical Imaging Consortium (MCIC) study of schizophrenia were used to analyse the interaction effects between 1,067,955 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and disease status on left STG thickness in 126 healthy controls and 113 patients with schizophrenia. We next used a pathway approach to detect underlying pathophysiological pathways that may be related to schizophrenia. RESULTS: No SNP by diagnosis interaction effect reached genome-wide significance (5 × 10-8) in our GWA study, but 10 SNPs reached P-values less than 10-6. The most prominent pathways included those involved in insulin, calcium, PI3K-Akt and MAPK signalling. CONCLUSIONS: Our strongest findings in the GWA study and pathway analysis point towards an involvement of glucose metabolism in left STG thickness reduction in patients with schizophrenia only. These results are in line with recently published studies, which showed an increased prevalence of psychosis among patients with metabolic syndrome-related illnesses including diabetes.
| S-EPMC4795983 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Humans are unique in their ability to communicate information through representational gestures which visually simulate an action (eg. moving hands as if opening a jar). Previous research indicates that the intention to communicate modulates the kinematics (e.g., velocity, size) of such gestures. If and how this modulation influences addressees' comprehension of gestures have not been investigated. Here we ask whether communicative kinematic modulation enhances semantic comprehension (i.e., identification) of gestures. We additionally investigate whether any comprehension advantage is due to enhanced early identification or late identification. Participants (n = 20) watched videos of representational gestures produced in a more- (n = 60) or less-communicative (n = 60) context and performed a forced-choice recognition task. We tested the isolated role of kinematics by removing visibility of actor's faces in Experiment I, and by reducing the stimuli to stick-light figures in Experiment II. Three video lengths were used to disentangle early identification from late identification. Accuracy and response time quantified main effects. Kinematic modulation was tested for correlations with task performance. We found higher gesture identification performance in more- compared to less-communicative gestures. However, early identification was only enhanced within a full visual context, while late identification occurred even when viewing isolated kinematics. Additionally, temporally segmented acts with more post-stroke holds were associated with higher accuracy. Our results demonstrate that communicative signaling, interacting with other visual cues, generally supports gesture identification, while kinematic modulation specifically enhances late identification in the absence of other cues. Results provide insights into mutual understanding processes as well as creating artificial communicative agents.
| S-EPMC7772160 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among age, first- and second-order Theory of Mind and the increasing ability of children to understand and produce different kinds of communicative acts - sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - expressed through linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. To communicate means to modify an interlocutor's mental states (Grice, 1989), and pragmatics studies the inferential processes that are necessary to fill the gap, which often exists in human communication, between the literal meaning of a speaker's utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate to the interlocutor. We administered brief video-clip stories showing different kinds of pragmatic phenomena - sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years. The results showed the existence of a trend of difficulty in children's ability to deal with both linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic tasks, from the simplest to the most difficult: sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age plays a significant role in explaining children's performance on each pragmatic task. Furthermore, the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that first-order ToM has a causal role in explaining children's performance in handling sincere and deceitful speech acts, but not irony. We did not detect any specific role for second-order ToM. Finally, ToM only partially explains the observed increasing trend of difficulty in children's pragmatic performance: the variance in pragmatic performance explained by ToM increases between sincere and deceitful communicative acts, but not between deceit and irony. The role of inferential ability in explaining the improvement in children's performance across the pragmatic tasks investigated is discussed.
| S-EPMC5276808 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundSchizophrenia is a heterogeneous disorder that may consist of multiple etiologies and disease processes. Auditory hallucinations (AH), which are common and often disabling, represent a narrower and more basic dimension of psychosis than schizophrenia. Previous studies suggest that abnormal primary auditory cortex activity is associated with AH pathogenesis. We thus investigated functional connectivity, using a seed in primary auditory cortex, in schizophrenia patients with and without AH and healthy controls, to examine neural circuit abnormalities associated more specifically with AH than the myriad other symptoms that comprise schizophrenia.MethodsUsing resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI), we investigated functional connectivity of the primary auditory cortex, located on Heschl's gyrus, in schizophrenia spectrum patients with AH. Participants were patients with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or schizophreniform disorder with lifetime AH (n=27); patients with the same diagnoses but no lifetime AH (n=14); and healthy controls (n=28).ResultsPatients with AH vulnerability showed increased left Heschl's gyrus functional connectivity with left frontoparietal regions and decreased functional connectivity with right hippocampal formation and mediodorsal thalamus compared to patients without lifetime AH. Furthermore, among AH patients, left Heschl's gyrus functional connectivity covaried positively with AH severity in left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca's area), left lateral STG, right pre- and postcentral gyri, cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex. There were no differences between patients with and without lifetime AH in right Heschl's gyrus seeded functional connectivity.ConclusionsAbnormal interactions between left Heschl's gyrus and regions involved in speech/language, memory, and the monitoring of self-generated events may contribute to AH vulnerability.
| S-EPMC3601525 | biostudies-literature
Project description:How to make sure that one's utterances are understood as intended when not facing each other? In order to convey communicative intentions, in digital communication emoticons and pragmatic cues are frequently used. Such cueing becomes even more crucial for implied interpretations (e.g., irony) that cannot be understood literally, but require extra information. Sentences, such as 'That's fantastic,' may achieve either a literal or ironic meaning depending on the contextual constraints. In two experiments using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we examined the effects of cueing communicative intentions (i.e., by means of quotation marks) on ironic and literal language comprehension. An impact of cueing on language processing was seen as early as 200 ms post-stimulus onset by the emergence of a P300 preceding a sustained positivity for cued irony relative to literal language, while for uncued irony a P200-P600 pattern was obtained. In presence of additional information for ironic intentions, pragmatic reanalysis allowing inferences on the message level may have occured immediately. Moreover, by examining the way of cueing (i.e., ambiguous vs. unambiguous cueing) this type of information for communicative intentions appeared to be only effective when the cues were unambiguous by matching pragmatic conventions. The findings suggest that cueing communicative intentions may immediately affect language comprehension, albeit depending on pragmatic conventions of the cues' usage.
| S-EPMC5600996 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Infants employ sophisticated mechanisms to acquire their first language, including some that rely on taking the perspective of adults as speakers or listeners. When do infants first show awareness of what other people understand? We tested 14-month-old infants in two experiments measuring event-related potentials. In Experiment 1, we established that infants produce the N400 effect, a brain signature of semantic violations, in a live object naming paradigm in the presence of an adult observer. In Experiment 2, we induced false beliefs about the labeled objects in the adult observer to test whether infants keep track of the other person's comprehension. The results revealed that infants reacted to the semantic incongruity heard by the other as if they encountered it themselves: they exhibited an N400-like response, even though labels were congruous from their perspective. This finding demonstrates that infants track the linguistic understanding of social partners.
| S-EPMC6492012 | biostudies-literature