Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06 UMR S 1127, Institut du Cerveau, ICM, Paris, France; AP-HP, Hôpital de La Pitié Salpêtrière, Féderation de Neurologie, Paris, France.
Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06 UMR S 1127, Institut du Cerveau, ICM, Paris, France.
Cortex. 2021 May;138:212-227. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2021.02.007. Epub 2021 Feb 19.
The classic cocktail party effect suggests that some, but probably not all levels of language processing can proceed without attention. We used whole-brain functional MRI to investigate how modality-specific and modality-independent language areas are modulated by the withdrawal of attention to another sensory modality (e.g., attending to vision during the presentation of auditory sentences, or vice-versa). We tested the hypotheses that inattention may abolish sentence-level integration and eliminate top-down effects. In both written and spoken modalities, language processing was strongly modulated by the distraction of attention, but this inattention effect varied considerably depending on the area and hierarchical level of language processing. Under inattention, a bottom-up activation remained in early modality-specific areas, particularly in superior temporal spoken-language areas, but the difference between sentences and words lists vanished. Under both attended and unattended conditions, ventral temporal cortices were activated in a top-down manner by spoken language more than by control stimuli, reaching posteriorily the Visual Word Form Area. We conclude that inattention prevents sentence-level syntactic and semantic integration, but preserves some top-down crossmodal processing, plus a large degree of bottom-up modality-specific processing, including a ventral occipito-temporal specialization for letter strings in a known alphabet.
经典鸡尾酒会效应表明，语言处理的某些（但可能不是全部）层次可以在没有注意力的情况下进行。我们使用全脑功能磁共振成像来研究当注意力从另一种感觉模态（例如，在呈现听觉句子时关注视觉，或者反之）转移时，特定模态和非特定模态的语言区域是如何被调节的。我们检验了以下假设：不注意可能会消除句子级别的整合，并消除自上而下的影响。在书面和口语两种模态中，语言处理都受到注意力分散的强烈调节，但这种不注意效应因语言处理的区域和层次而异。在不注意的情况下，在早期的特定模态区域中仍然存在自下而上的激活，特别是在颞上的口语语言区域，但句子和单词列表之间的差异消失了。在注意和不注意的情况下，下颞叶皮质都以上行方式被口语语言激活，比控制刺激更强烈，在后部达到视觉词形区。我们的结论是，不注意会阻止句子级别的句法和语义整合，但会保留一些自上而下的跨模态处理，以及较大程度的自下而上的特定模态处理，包括用于已知字母表中的字母串的腹侧枕颞专门化。
