Concepts are more than percepts: the case of action verbs.
Concepts are more than percepts: the case of action verbs.
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DOI：
10.1523/jneurosci.3039-08.2008
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发表时间：
2008-10-29
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Saxe R
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Bedny M;Caramazza A;Grossman E;Pascual-Leone A;Saxe R
当参与者阅读或听动作动词时，相对于其他单词和非单词类型，后侧颞叶皮质(PLTC)的几个区域被可靠地招募。这种PLTC激活通常被解释为反映动作的视觉运动特征的提取。这种解释支持更广泛的理论，即概念是由感觉-运动特征组成的。我们研究了对相同激活的另一种解释：动作动词的PLTC活动反映了对事件概念或与之相关的语法类型(即动词)的与情态无关的表征的提取。在fMRI扫描期间，参与者对视觉运动信息量不同的词对进行语义相关判断。与之前的结果相同，几个PLTC区域对描述动作的词与描述物体的词显示出更高的反应。然而，我们发现这些PLTC区域并不与视觉运动区域重叠。此外，无论视觉运动特征如何，他们对动词的反应都比对名词的反应高。例如，PLTC对动作动词(如奔跑)和心理动词(如思考)的反应同样高，对动物名词(如猫)和无生命的自然善意名词(如岩石)的反应同样低。因此，动作动词的PLTC活动可能反映了事件概念的提取，或与动词相关的语法信息。我们得出的结论是，概念是从感觉-运动经验中抽象出来的，并根据概念属性进行组织。
Several regions of the posterior-lateral-temporal cortices (PLTC) are reliably recruited when participants read or listen to action verbs, relative to other word and non-word types. This PLTC activation is generally interpreted as reflecting the retrieval of visual-motion features of actions. This interpretation supports the broader theory, that concepts are comprised of sensory-motor features. We investigated an alternative interpretation of the same activations: PLTC activity for action verbs reflects the retrieval of modality-independent representations of event concepts, or the grammatical types associated with them, i.e., verbs. During an fMRI scan, participants made semantic-relatedness judgments on word pairs varying in amount of visual-motion information. Replicating previous results, several PLTC regions showed higher responses to words that describe actions versus objects. However, we found that these PLTC regions did not overlap with visual-motion regions. Moreover, their response was higher for verbs than nouns, irrespective of visual-motion features. For example, the response of the PLTC is equally high to action verbs (e.g. to run) and mental verbs (e.g. to think), and equally low to animal nouns (e.g. the cat) and inanimate natural kind nouns (e.g. the rock). Thus PLTC activity for action verbs might reflect the retrieval of event concepts, or the grammatical information associated with verbs. We conclude that concepts are abstracted away from sensory-motor experience and organized according to conceptual properties.