Thibault Simon, Koun Eric, Salemme Romeo, Roy Alice C, Boulenger Véronique, Brozzoli Claudio
Integrative Multisensory Perception Action & Cognition Team (ImpAct), Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon, INSERM U1028, CNRS UMR5292, Lyon, France.
University of Lyon, Lyon, France.
Neurobiol Lang (Camb). 2024 Dec 3;5(4):1008-1024. doi: 10.1162/nol_a_00159. eCollection 2024.
Tool use and language are highly refined human abilities which may show neural commonalities due to their potential reciprocal interaction during evolution. Recent work provided evidence for shared neural resources between tool use and syntax. However, whether activity within the tool-use network also contributes to semantic neural representations of tool nouns remains untested. To this aim, we identified the tool-use planning network with functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants used pliers. The very same participants underwent a semantic priming task including two categories, tool nouns and animal nouns, to highlight the respective underlying networks. With multivariate analyses of the activation neural patterns, we tested whether activity in tool-use brain clusters takes part in the neural representation of tool nouns as compared with animal nouns. The results revealed that word semantic categories were decoded within the left occipito-temporal cortex activated by preparing to use a tool, with similar patterns of brain activity for words within the same category. In addition, in the same area, neural activations for tool nouns were found to be higher than those for animal nouns. These findings suggest that activity in tool-use related brain areas encodes semantic information separately for tool nouns and animal nouns, thus supporting the embodiment of tool-noun processing in the tool-use sensorimotor network.
工具使用和语言是高度精炼的人类能力，由于它们在进化过程中可能存在的相互作用，可能显示出神经上的共性。最近的研究为工具使用和句法之间共享神经资源提供了证据。然而，工具使用网络中的活动是否也有助于工具名词的语义神经表征仍未得到检验。为了实现这一目标，我们在参与者使用钳子时，通过功能磁共振成像识别了工具使用规划网络。同样的参与者进行了一项语义启动任务，包括工具名词和动物名词两个类别，以突出各自潜在的网络。通过对激活神经模式的多变量分析，我们测试了与动物名词相比，工具使用脑区的活动是否参与了工具名词的神经表征。结果显示，在准备使用工具时激活的左枕颞叶皮质内解码了单词语义类别，同一类别的单词具有相似的脑活动模式。此外，在同一区域，发现工具名词的神经激活高于动物名词。这些发现表明，工具使用相关脑区的活动分别为工具名词和动物名词编码语义信息，从而支持了工具名词处理在工具使用感觉运动网络中的体现。
