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People can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions

What is the relationship between our perceptual and linguistic neural representations of the same event? We approached this question by asking whether visual perception of motion and understanding linguistic depictions of motion rely on the same neural architecture. The same group of participants to...

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Autores principales: Dravida, Swethasri, Saxe, Rebecca, Bedny, Marina
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3755324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24009592
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00537
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author Dravida, Swethasri
Saxe, Rebecca
Bedny, Marina
author_facet Dravida, Swethasri
Saxe, Rebecca
Bedny, Marina
author_sort Dravida, Swethasri
collection PubMed
description What is the relationship between our perceptual and linguistic neural representations of the same event? We approached this question by asking whether visual perception of motion and understanding linguistic depictions of motion rely on the same neural architecture. The same group of participants took part in two language tasks and one visual task. In task 1, participants made semantic similarity judgments with high motion (e.g., “to bounce”) and low motion (e.g., “to look”) words. In task 2, participants made plausibility judgments for passages describing movement (“A centaur hurled a spear … ”) or cognitive events (“A gentleman loved cheese …”). Task 3 was a visual motion localizer in which participants viewed animations of point-light walkers, randomly moving dots, and stationary dots changing in luminance. Based on the visual motion localizer we identified classic visual motion areas of the temporal (MT/MST and STS) and parietal cortex (inferior and superior parietal lobules). We find that these visual cortical areas are largely distinct from neural responses to linguistic depictions of motion. Motion words did not activate any part of the visual motion system. Motion passages produced a small response in the right superior parietal lobule, but none of the temporal motion regions. These results suggest that (1) as compared to words, rich language stimuli such as passages are more likely to evoke mental imagery and more likely to affect perceptual circuits and (2) effects of language on the visual system are more likely in secondary perceptual areas as compared to early sensory areas. We conclude that language and visual perception constitute distinct but interacting systems.
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spelling pubmed-37553242013-09-04 People can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions Dravida, Swethasri Saxe, Rebecca Bedny, Marina Front Psychol Psychology What is the relationship between our perceptual and linguistic neural representations of the same event? We approached this question by asking whether visual perception of motion and understanding linguistic depictions of motion rely on the same neural architecture. The same group of participants took part in two language tasks and one visual task. In task 1, participants made semantic similarity judgments with high motion (e.g., “to bounce”) and low motion (e.g., “to look”) words. In task 2, participants made plausibility judgments for passages describing movement (“A centaur hurled a spear … ”) or cognitive events (“A gentleman loved cheese …”). Task 3 was a visual motion localizer in which participants viewed animations of point-light walkers, randomly moving dots, and stationary dots changing in luminance. Based on the visual motion localizer we identified classic visual motion areas of the temporal (MT/MST and STS) and parietal cortex (inferior and superior parietal lobules). We find that these visual cortical areas are largely distinct from neural responses to linguistic depictions of motion. Motion words did not activate any part of the visual motion system. Motion passages produced a small response in the right superior parietal lobule, but none of the temporal motion regions. These results suggest that (1) as compared to words, rich language stimuli such as passages are more likely to evoke mental imagery and more likely to affect perceptual circuits and (2) effects of language on the visual system are more likely in secondary perceptual areas as compared to early sensory areas. We conclude that language and visual perception constitute distinct but interacting systems. Frontiers Media S.A. 2013-08-28 /pmc/articles/PMC3755324/ /pubmed/24009592 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00537 Text en Copyright © 2013 Dravida, Saxe and Bedny. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Dravida, Swethasri
Saxe, Rebecca
Bedny, Marina
People can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions
title People can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions
title_full People can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions
title_fullStr People can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions
title_full_unstemmed People can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions
title_short People can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions
title_sort people can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3755324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24009592
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00537
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