Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, Interdisciplinary Institute of Neuroscience and Technology, Qiushi Academy for Advanced Studies, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, 310027, Hangzhou, China.
State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China.
Nat Commun. 2018 Dec 18;9(1):5374. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-07773-y.
The sensory and motor systems jointly contribute to complex behaviors, but whether motor systems are involved in high-order perceptual tasks such as speech and auditory comprehension remain debated. Here, we show that ocular muscle activity is synchronized to mentally constructed sentences during speech listening, in the absence of any sentence-related visual or prosodic cue. Ocular tracking of sentences is observed in the vertical electrooculogram (EOG), whether the eyes are open or closed, and in eye blinks measured by eyetracking. Critically, the phase of sentence-tracking ocular activity is strongly modulated by temporal attention, i.e., which word in a sentence is attended. Ocular activity also tracks high-level structures in non-linguistic auditory and visual sequences, and captures rapid fluctuations in temporal attention. Ocular tracking of non-visual rhythms possibly reflects global neural entrainment to task-relevant temporal structures across sensory and motor areas, which could serve to implement temporal attention and coordinate cortical networks.
感觉和运动系统共同促成了复杂行为，但运动系统是否参与了言语和听觉理解等高级感知任务仍存在争议。在这里，我们发现，在听言语时，即使没有任何与句子相关的视觉或韵律提示，眼球肌肉活动也会与大脑中构建的句子同步。在垂直眼电图 (EOG) 中可以观察到眼球对句子的跟踪，无论眼睛是睁开还是闭合，以及通过眼动追踪测量的眼眨眼。关键的是，句子跟踪眼球活动的相位受到时间注意的强烈调制，即句子中的哪个词受到关注。眼球活动还可以跟踪非语言听觉和视觉序列中的高级结构，并捕捉时间注意的快速波动。非视觉节奏的眼球跟踪可能反映了跨感觉和运动区域的与任务相关的时间结构的全局神经同步，这可能有助于实现时间注意并协调皮质网络。
