Dear Users

Today (4.15-5.15 pm in YNiC) there will be a project proposal presentation given by Markus van Ackeren. The title of the talk is "Cortical Dynamics during Pragmatic Inferences about Action". Please see below for the abstract.

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Best wishes Rebecca

Abstract: A plethora of studies have shown that understanding the meaning of words recruits modality-specific areas in the brain, beyond classical language regions. For example, reading words denotingactions (e.g., grasp) also engages areas in the brain that are primarily involved in the control of ourmotor system. However, the level at which this neural motor system (NMS) might become importantduring language comprehension is still debated. In some theories, action information is regarded asconstitutive of word meaning. Specifically, this idea entails that the activation in the NMS is drivendirectly by the word-from of a word. However, others have argued that NMS is activated after wordmeaning has been accessed, which suggests that the NMS is either compositional or epiphenomenalto language understanding.One way to dissociate between different theories is to study utterances in which what is said (literalmeaning), and what is meant (speaker meaning) are not the same. For example, the utterance “it ishot here” does not contain any action information by itself. However, taking into account theintention of the speaker (theory of mind), the utterance might be interpreted as an implied requestfor action (e.g., to open the window). In a previous study we used fMRI to show that both a) neuralmotor and b) theory of mind regions are sensitive to implied requests, suggesting that actioninformation becomes important at a level beyond literal sentence meaning.In the current project, we are interested in the dynamics of motor and theory of mind regions duringlanguage comprehension. Specifically, we will use a modified version of the previous paradigm inwhich the listener will be asked to focus either on the literal meaning (Is this a sensible sentence?),or the speaker meaning of the utterance (Does the person want something from you?). Our goal isto analyse the interaction between a set of posterior regions using dynamic causal modelling (DCM).Specifically, the previous study revealed a set of regions in the posterior part of the brain that areassociated with language perception (MTG), theory of mind (pSTS/TPJ), and motor control (IPL/SMG)respectively. There are different ways in which these regions might interact when a person focuseson the speaker meaning of an utterance. For example, we could find a facilitation of forwardconnections from MTG to both pSTS/TPJ and IPL/SMG. Alternatively, the backward connectionbetween pSTS/TPJ and IPL/SMG might be facilitated.