School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, 52 Haidian Road, Beijing 100080, China.
Cereb Cortex. 2023 Feb 7;33(4):1328-1346. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhac139.
Life and death are 2 fundamental concepts regarding existence of organisms. People often signify these concepts using symbols to facilitate communications, but how the brain learns and represents these symbols remains unclear. In the present study, we quantified behavioral and brain responses during learning associations between words ("life" or "death") with shapes as concrete referents. Behavioral responses to word-shape pairs showed an affirmative response bias to life-shape pairs but a denial response bias to death-shape pairs. Multimodal brain imaging results revealed that the right frontal and dorsal cingulate cortices monitored these response biases, respectively. Moreover, relative to unlearned shapes, life-related shapes induced increased alpha (9-14 Hz) oscillations in the right parietal cortex and precuneus, whereas death-related shapes enhanced beta (15-30 Hz) oscillations in the left parietal cortex, superior temporal sulcus, and precuneus. Our findings unraveled distinct neurocognitive mechanisms underlying learning and representations of concrete referents of life and death concepts.
生与死是关于生物存在的两个基本概念。人们通常使用符号来表示这些概念，以方便交流，但大脑如何学习和表示这些符号仍不清楚。在本研究中，我们量化了在学习单词（“生命”或“死亡”）与形状作为具体指称之间的关联过程中的行为和大脑反应。对单词-形状对的行为反应表现出对生命-形状对的肯定反应偏向，但对死亡-形状对的否定反应偏向。多模态脑成像结果表明，右侧额极和背侧扣带回分别监测这些反应偏向。此外，与未学习的形状相比，与生命相关的形状在右侧顶叶皮层和楔前叶引起了α（9-14 Hz）振荡的增加，而与死亡相关的形状则增强了左侧顶叶皮层、颞上沟和楔前叶的β（15-30 Hz）振荡。我们的研究结果揭示了学习和表示生与死概念的具体指称背后的不同神经认知机制。
