Wales Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, UK,
Exp Brain Res. 2013 Oct;230(3):345-57. doi: 10.1007/s00221-013-3659-1. Epub 2013 Aug 21.
Seeing Suzie bite an apple or reading the sentence 'Suzie munched the apple' both convey a similar idea. But is there a common neural basis for action comprehension when generated through video or text? The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to address this question. Participants observed videos or read sentences that described two categories of actions: eating and cleaning. A conjunction analysis of video and sentence stimuli revealed that cleaning actions (compared to eating actions) showed a greater response in dorsal frontoparietal regions, as well as within the medial fusiform gyrus. These findings reveal supramodal representations of perceived actions in the human brain, which are specific to action categories and independent of input modality (video or written words). In addition, some brain regions associated with cleaning and eating actions showed an interaction with modality, which was manifested as a greater sensitivity for video compared with sentence stimuli. Together, this pattern of results demonstrates both supramodal and modality-sensitive representations of action categories in the human brain, a finding with implications for how we understand other people's actions from video and written sources.
看到苏西咬苹果或读到“苏西嚼苹果”这句话都传达了类似的意思。但是，通过视频或文本生成的动作理解是否有共同的神经基础呢？本研究使用功能磁共振成像来解决这个问题。参与者观察描述两种动作（吃和清洁）的视频或阅读句子。视频和句子刺激的联合分析表明，清洁动作（与吃的动作相比）在背侧额顶叶区域以及内侧梭状回中表现出更大的反应。这些发现揭示了人类大脑中感知动作的超模态表示，这些表示与动作类别有关，与输入模态（视频或书面文字）无关。此外，与清洁和吃的动作相关的一些大脑区域与模态存在相互作用，这表现为与句子刺激相比，视频刺激的敏感性更高。总的来说，这种结果模式表明，人类大脑对动作类别既有超模态的又有模态敏感的表示，这一发现对于我们如何从视频和书面来源理解他人的动作具有重要意义。
