Institut des Sciences, Cognitives - Marc Jeannerod (UMR 5304), CNRS, Université de Lyon, France.
Institut des Sciences, Cognitives - Marc Jeannerod (UMR 5304), CNRS, Université de Lyon, France; Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9193 - SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, F-59000 Lille, France.
Brain Cogn. 2020 Nov;145:105628. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2020.105628. Epub 2020 Sep 30.
Our study was designed to test a recent proposal by Cayol and Nazir (2020), according to which language processing takes advantage of motor system "emulators". An emulator is a brain mechanism that learns the causal relationship between an action and its sensory consequences. Emulators predict the outcome of a motor command in terms of its sensory reafference and serve monitoring ongoing movements. For the purpose of motor planning/learning, emulators can "run offline", decoupled from sensory input and motor output. Such offline simulations are equivalent to mental imagery (Grush, 2004). If language processing can profit from the associative-memory network of emulators, mental-imagery-aptitude should predict language skills. However, this should hold only for language content that is imageable. We tested this assumption in typically developing adolescents using two motor-imagery paradigms. One that measured participant's error in estimating their motor ability, and another that measured the time to perform a mental simulation. When the time to perform a mental simulation is taken as measure, mental-imagery-aptitude does indeed selectively predict word-definition performance for high imageable words. These results provide an alternative position relative to the question of why language processes recruit modality-specific brain regions and support the often-hypothesized link between language and motor skills.
我们的研究旨在检验 Cayol 和 Nazir（2020）最近提出的一个假说，即语言处理利用了运动系统“模拟器”。模拟器是一种大脑机制，它学习了动作与其感官后果之间的因果关系。模拟器根据运动指令的感觉再传入来预测其结果，并用于监测正在进行的运动。为了进行运动规划/学习，模拟器可以“离线运行”，与感觉输入和运动输出解耦。这种离线模拟相当于心理意象（Grush，2004）。如果语言处理可以从模拟器的联想记忆网络中获益，那么心理意象能力应该可以预测语言技能。然而，这应该只适用于可形象化的语言内容。我们使用两种运动意象范式在典型发育的青少年中测试了这一假设。一种测量参与者估计自己运动能力的误差，另一种测量进行心理模拟的时间。当以进行心理模拟的时间作为衡量标准时，心理意象能力确实可以选择性地预测高可形象化单词的词义表现。这些结果提供了一个相对于为什么语言过程需要特定模态的大脑区域的替代观点，并支持了语言和运动技能之间经常被假设的联系。
