Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Nijmegen 6500 HB, The Netherlands.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Sep 3;110(36):14574-9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1303170110. Epub 2013 Aug 19.
Human referential communication is often thought as coding-decoding a set of symbols, neglecting that establishing shared meanings requires a computational mechanism powerful enough to mutually negotiate them. Sharing the meaning of a novel symbol might rely on similar conceptual inferences across communicators or on statistical similarities in their sensorimotor behaviors. Using magnetoencephalography, we assess spectral, temporal, and spatial characteristics of neural activity evoked when people generate and understand novel shared symbols during live communicative interactions. Solving those communicative problems induced comparable changes in the spectral profile of neural activity of both communicators and addressees. This shared neuronal up-regulation was spatially localized to the right temporal lobe and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and emerged already before the occurrence of a specific communicative problem. Communicative innovation relies on neuronal computations that are shared across generating and understanding novel shared symbols, operating over temporal scales independent from transient sensorimotor behavior.
人类的指称性交际通常被认为是对一组符号进行编码和解码，而忽略了建立共同意义需要一个足够强大的计算机制来相互协商。共享一个新符号的意义可能依赖于交际者之间相似的概念推理，或者依赖于他们的感觉运动行为中的统计相似性。使用脑磁图，我们评估了人们在实时交际互动中生成和理解新的共享符号时神经活动的光谱、时间和空间特征。解决这些交际问题会导致交际者和接受者的神经活动的光谱特征发生类似的变化。这种共享的神经元上调被局部定位于右颞叶和腹内侧前额叶，并且在出现特定交际问题之前就已经出现。交际创新依赖于在生成和理解新的共享符号时共享的神经元计算，这些计算在时间尺度上独立于短暂的感觉运动行为。
