Visani Elisa, Garofalo Gioacchino, Rossi Sebastiano Davide, Duran Dunja, Craighero Laila, Riggio Lucia, Buccino Giovanni
Bioengineering Unit, Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Neurologico Carlo Besta, Milan, Italy.
Division of Neuroscience, Universitity "Vita-Salute" San Raffaele, Milan, Italy.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2022 Dec 13;16:1008995. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.1008995. eCollection 2022.
There is experimental evidence that the brain systems involved in action execution also play a role in action observation and understanding. Recently, it has been suggested that the sensorimotor system is also involved in language processing. Supporting results are slower response times and weaker motor-related MEG Beta band power suppression in semantic decision tasks on single action verbs labels when the stimulus and the motor response involve the same effector. Attenuated power suppression indicates decreased cortical excitability and consequent decreased readiness to act. The embodied approach forwards that the simultaneous involvement of the sensorimotor system in the processing of the linguistic content and in the planning of the response determines this language-motor interference effect. Here, in a combined behavioral and MEG study we investigated to what extent the processing of actions visually presented (i.e., pictures of actions) and verbally described (i.e., verbs in written words) share common neural mechanisms. The findings demonstrated that, whether an action is experienced visually or verbally, its processing engages the sensorimotor system in a comparable way. These results provide further support to the embodied view of semantic processing, suggesting that this process is independent from the modality of presentation of the stimulus, including language.
有实验证据表明，参与动作执行的大脑系统在动作观察和理解中也发挥作用。最近，有人提出感觉运动系统也参与语言处理。支持这一观点的结果是，当刺激和运动反应涉及相同效应器时，在对单个动作动词标签进行语义决策任务时，反应时间会变慢，且与运动相关的脑磁图β波段功率抑制会减弱。功率抑制减弱表明皮质兴奋性降低，进而导致行动准备性下降。具身认知方法认为，感觉运动系统在语言内容处理和反应计划中的同时参与决定了这种语言 - 运动干扰效应。在此，我们通过一项行为学和脑磁图相结合的研究，调查了视觉呈现的动作（即动作图片）和语言描述的动作（即书面文字中的动词）的处理在多大程度上共享共同的神经机制。研究结果表明，无论动作是通过视觉还是语言体验，其处理过程以类似的方式激活感觉运动系统。这些结果为语义处理的具身认知观点提供了进一步支持，表明这一过程独立于刺激的呈现方式，包括语言。
