Grand Valley State University, Department of Psychology, 2224 Au Sable Hall, Allendale, MI 49401, United States.
Brain Lang. 2013 Sep;126(3):338-49. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2013.07.003. Epub 2013 Aug 8.
Previous research has shown that readers generate mental images of events. Most studies have investigated imagery during the reading of short texts, which also included explicit judgment tasks. In two fMRI studies, we assessed whether modality-specific imagery occurs during naturalistic, discourse comprehension. We identified clauses in the texts that elicited auditory, motor, or visual imagery. In both studies, reading motor imagery clauses was associated with increases in activity in left postcentral and precentral sulci, and reading auditory imagery clauses was associated with increases in left superior temporal gyrus and perisylvian language-related regions. Study 2 compared presentation of connected discourse to a condition in which unconnected sentences were presented, preventing the establishment of global coherence. Sensorimotor imagery was strongest when readers were able to generate a globally coherent discourse representation. Overall, these results suggest that modality-specific imagery occurs during discourse comprehension and it is dependent on the development of discourse-level representations.
先前的研究表明，读者会在头脑中生成对事件的想象。大多数研究都调查了在阅读短文过程中的想象，其中还包括明确的判断任务。在两项 fMRI 研究中，我们评估了在自然的、语篇理解过程中是否会产生特定于感觉模式的想象。我们在文本中确定了引发听觉、运动或视觉想象的子句。在这两项研究中，阅读运动想象子句与左中央后回和中央前回的活动增加有关，而阅读听觉想象子句与左颞上回和与语言相关的周围脑回的活动增加有关。研究 2 将连贯语篇的呈现与不连贯句子呈现的条件进行了比较，从而防止了整体连贯性的建立。当读者能够生成整体连贯的语篇表示时，感觉运动想象最为强烈。总的来说，这些结果表明，特定于感觉模式的想象会在语篇理解过程中发生，并且依赖于语篇层面的表示的发展。
