Kewenig Viktor Nikolaus, Vigliocco Gabriella, Skipper Jeremy I
Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Elife. 2024 Dec 5;13:RP91522. doi: 10.7554/eLife.91522.
Language is acquired and processed in complex and dynamic naturalistic contexts, involving the simultaneous processing of connected speech, faces, bodies, objects, etc. How words and their associated concepts are encoded in the brain during real-world processing is still unknown. Here, the representational structure of concrete and abstract concepts was investigated during movie watching to address the extent to which brain responses dynamically change depending on visual context. First, across contexts, concrete and abstract concepts are shown to encode different experience-based information in separable sets of brain regions. However, these differences are reduced when multimodal context is considered. Specifically, the response profile of abstract words becomes more concrete-like when these are processed in visual scenes highly related to their meaning. Conversely, when the visual context is unrelated to a given concrete word, the activation pattern resembles more that of abstract conceptual processing. These results suggest that while concepts generally encode habitual experiences, the underlying neurobiological organisation is not fixed but depends dynamically on available contextual information.
语言是在复杂且动态的自然环境中习得和处理的，这涉及到对连贯语音、面孔、身体、物体等的同时处理。在现实世界的信息处理过程中，单词及其相关概念在大脑中是如何编码的，目前仍然未知。在这里，为了探究大脑反应在多大程度上会根据视觉情境而动态变化，我们在观看电影的过程中对具体概念和抽象概念的表征结构进行了研究。首先，在各种情境下，具体概念和抽象概念在大脑区域的不同集合中编码不同的基于经验的信息。然而，当考虑多模态情境时，这些差异会减小。具体而言，当抽象词在与其含义高度相关的视觉场景中被处理时，其反应特征会变得更像具体词。相反，当视觉情境与某个给定的具体词无关时，激活模式更类似于抽象概念处理的模式。这些结果表明，虽然概念通常编码习惯性经验，但其潜在的神经生物学组织并非固定不变，而是动态地依赖于可用的情境信息。
