Noordzij Matthijs L, Newman-Norlund Sarah E, de Ruiter Jan Peter, Hagoort Peter, Levinson Stephen C, Toni Ivan
Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2009 Jul 30;3:14. doi: 10.3389/neuro.09.014.2009. eCollection 2009.
Human communication has been described as involving the coding-decoding of a conventional symbol system, which could be supported by parts of the human motor system (i.e. the "mirror neurons system"). However, this view does not explain how these conventions could develop in the first place. Here we target the neglected but crucial issue of how people organize their non-verbal behavior to communicate a given intention without pre-established conventions. We have measured behavioral and brain responses in pairs of subjects during communicative exchanges occurring in a real, interactive, on-line social context. In two fMRI studies, we found robust evidence that planning new communicative actions (by a sender) and recognizing the communicative intention of the same actions (by a receiver) relied on spatially overlapping portions of their brains (the right posterior superior temporal sulcus). The response of this region was lateralized to the right hemisphere, modulated by the ambiguity in meaning of the communicative acts, but not by their sensorimotor complexity. These results indicate that the sender of a communicative signal uses his own intention recognition system to make a prediction of the intention recognition performed by the receiver. This finding supports the notion that our communicative abilities are distinct from both sensorimotor processes and language abilities.
人类交流被描述为涉及一种传统符号系统的编码-解码，这可能得到人类运动系统的某些部分（即“镜像神经元系统”）的支持。然而，这种观点并未解释这些惯例最初是如何形成的。在这里，我们针对一个被忽视但至关重要的问题，即人们如何在没有预先确立的惯例的情况下组织他们的非语言行为来传达特定意图。我们在真实、互动、在线社交环境中发生的交流互动过程中，测量了成对受试者的行为和大脑反应。在两项功能磁共振成像研究中，我们发现了有力证据，即规划新的交流行为（由发送者）和识别相同行为的交流意图（由接收者）依赖于他们大脑中空间重叠的部分（右后颞上沟）。该区域的反应在右半球呈现出偏侧化，受交流行为意义模糊性的调节，但不受其感觉运动复杂性的调节。这些结果表明，交流信号的发送者利用自己的意图识别系统来预测接收者所进行的意图识别。这一发现支持了这样一种观点，即我们的交流能力既不同于感觉运动过程，也不同于语言能力。
