Aesthetic emotions are affected by context: a psychometric network analysis.

Aesthetic emotions are defined as emotions arising when a person evaluates a stimulus for its aesthetic appeal. Whether these emotions are unique to aesthetic activities is debated. We address this debate by examining if recollections of different types of engaging activities entail different emotional profiles.

What kind of impacts can artwork have on viewers? Establishing a taxonomy for aesthetic impacts.

What kinds of impacts can visual art have on a viewer? To identify potential art impacts, we recruited five aesthetics experts from different academic disciplines: art history, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and theology. Together, the group curated a set of terms that corresponded to descriptive features (124 terms) and cognitive-affective impacts (69 terms) of artworks. Using these terms as prompts, participants (n = 899) were given one minute to generate words for each term related to how an artwork looked (descriptive features) or made them think or feel (cognitive-affective impacts).

Sensitive Measures of Cognition in Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Background: Sensitive measures of cognition are needed in preclinical and prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD) to track cognitive change and evaluate potential interventions. Neurofibrillary tangle pathology in AD is first observed in Brodmann Area 35 (BA35), the medial portion of the perirhinal cortex. The importance of the perirhinal cortex for semantic memory may explain early impairments of semantics in preclinical AD.

The Neural Basis of Metaphor Comprehension: Evidence from Left Hemisphere Degeneration.

Despite the ubiquity of metaphor in cognition and communication, it is absent from standard clinical assessments of language, and the neural systems that support metaphor processing are debated. Previous research shows that patients with focal brain lesions can display selective impairments in processing metaphor, suggesting that figurative language abilities may be disproportionately vulnerable to brain injury. We hypothesized that metaphor processing is especially vulnerable to neurodegenerative disease, and that the left hemisphere is critical for normal metaphor processing.

Context matters: Novel metaphors in supportive and non-supportive contexts.

Creative language is defined as linguistic output that is both novel and appropriate. Metaphors are one such example of creative language in which one concept is used to express another by highlighting relevant semantic features. While novelty is an inherent property of unfamiliar metaphors, appropriateness depends on the context.

From action to abstraction: The sensorimotor grounding of metaphor in Parkinson's disease.

Embodied cognition theories propose that the semantic representations engaged in during language comprehension are partly supported by perceptual and motor systems, via simulation. Activation in modality-specific regions of cortex is associated with the comprehension of literal language that describes the analogous modalities, but studies addressing the grounding of non-literal or figurative language, such as metaphors, have yielded mixed results. Differences in the psycholinguistic characteristics of sentence stimuli across studies have likely contributed to this lack of consensus.

Effects of Chronic Brain Injury on Quality of Life: A Study in Patients With Left- or Right-Sided Lesion.

Objectives: To test the hypothesis that quality of life (QOL) is made up of different components, and each of these has different anatomic and demographic contributors.

Design: Questionnaire-based study.

Setting: Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania.

Selective Metaphor Impairments After Left, Not Right, Hemisphere Injury.

The relative contributions of the left and right hemispheres to the processing of metaphoric language remains unresolved. Neuropsychological studies of brain-injured patients have motivated the hypothesis that the right hemisphere plays a critical role in understanding metaphors. However, the data are inconsistent and the hypothesis is not well-supported by neuroimaging research.

Metaphor: Bridging embodiment to abstraction.

Embodied cognition accounts posit that concepts are grounded in our sensory and motor systems. An important challenge for these accounts is explaining how abstract concepts, which do not directly call upon sensory or motor information, can be informed by experience. We propose that metaphor is one important vehicle guiding the development and use of abstract concepts.

Stimulus needs are a moving target: 240 additional matched literal and metaphorical sentences for testing neural hypotheses about metaphor.

As the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor has evolved, so too have the theoretical questions of greatest interest. To keep pace with these developments, in the present study we generated a large set of metaphoric and literal sentence pairs ideally suited to addressing the current methodological and conceptual needs of metaphor researchers. In particular, the need has emerged to distinguish metaphors along three dimensions: the grammatical class of their base terms, the sensorimotor features of their base terms, and the syntactic form in which the base terms appear.

Fronto-temporal regions encode the manner of motion in spatial language.

When describing spatial events, dynamic actions can be decomposed into the path of motion (where the object moves), and the manner of motion (how the object moves). These components may be instantiated in two processing streams in the human brain, wherein dorsal parietal areas process path-related information, while ventral temporal regions process manner information. Previous research showed this pattern during the observation of videos showing animate characters in motion [15].

Flying under the radar: figurative language impairments in focal lesion patients.

Despite the prevalent and natural use of metaphor in everyday language, the neural basis of this powerful communication device remains poorly understood. Early studies of brain-injured patients suggested the right hemisphere plays a critical role in metaphor comprehension, but more recent patient and neuroimaging studies do not consistently support this hypothesis. One explanation for this discrepancy is the challenge in designing optimal tasks for brain-injured populations.

The specificity of action knowledge in sensory and motor systems.

Neuroimaging studies have found that sensorimotor systems are engaged when participants observe actions or comprehend action language. However, most of these studies have asked the binary question of whether action concepts are embodied or not, rather than whether sensory and motor areas of the brain contain graded amounts of information during putative action simulations. To address this question, we used repetition suppression (RS) functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine if functionally-localized motor movement and visual motion regions-of-interest (ROI) and two anatomical ROIs (inferior frontal gyrus, IFG; left posterior middle temporal gyrus, pMTG) were sensitive to changes in the exemplar (e.

Action concepts in the brain: an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis.

Many recent neuroimaging studies have investigated the representation of semantic memory for actions in the brain. We used activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses to answer two outstanding questions about the neural basis of action concepts. First, on an "embodied" view of semantic memory, evidence to date is unclear regarding whether visual motion or motor systems are more consistently engaged by action concepts.

Not all analogies are created equal: Associative and categorical analogy processing following brain damage.

Current research on analogy processing assumes that different conceptual relations are treated similarly. However, just as words and concepts are related in distinct ways, different kinds of analogies may employ distinct types of relationships. An important distinction in how words are related is the difference between associative (dog-bone) and categorical (dog-cat) relations.

From novel to familiar: tuning the brain for metaphors.

Metaphors are fundamental to creative thought and expression. Newly coined metaphors regularly infiltrate our collective vocabulary and gradually become familiar, but it is unclear how this shift from novel to conventionalized meaning happens in the brain. We investigated the neural career of metaphors in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study using extensively normed new metaphors and simulated the ordinary, gradual experience of metaphor conventionalization by manipulating participants' exposure to these metaphors.

Deconstructing events: the neural bases for space, time, and causality.

Space, time, and causality provide a natural structure for organizing our experience. These abstract categories allow us to think relationally in the most basic sense; understanding simple events requires one to represent the spatial relations among objects, the relative durations of actions or movements, and the links between causes and effects. The present fMRI study investigates the extent to which the brain distinguishes between these fundamental conceptual domains.

Stimulus design is an obstacle course: 560 matched literal and metaphorical sentences for testing neural hypotheses about metaphor.

Despite the ubiquity and importance of metaphor in thought and communication, its neural mediation remains elusive. We suggest that this uncertainty reflects, in part, stimuli that have not been designed with recent conceptual frameworks in mind or that have been hampered by inadvertent differences between metaphoric and literal conditions. In this article, we begin addressing these shortcomings by developing a large, flexible, extensively normed, and theoretically motivated set of metaphoric and literal sentences.

Prescribed spatial prepositions influence how we think about time.

Prepositions combine with nouns flexibly when describing concrete locative relations (e.g. at/on/in the school) but are rigidly prescribed when paired with abstract concepts (e.

Beyond laterality: a critical assessment of research on the neural basis of metaphor.

Metaphors are a fundamental aspect of human cognition. The major neuropsychological hypothesis that metaphoric processing relies primarily on the right hemisphere is not confirmed consistently. We propose ways to advance our understanding of the neuropsychology of metaphor that go beyond simple laterality.

Left inferior prefrontal cortex activity reflects inhibitory rather than facilitatory priming.

Functional neuroimaging has demonstrated reduced activation correlated with behavioral priming effects, a finding generally interpreted in terms of facilitated retrieval of target items in the context of related primes. Without a neutral prime, however, one cannot separate facilitatory effects of related primes from inhibitory effects of unrelated primes. Here we report an auditory semantic priming paradigm with congruent (''The boy bounced the BALL''), neutral (''The next item is BALL''), and incongruent (''Pasta is my favorite kind of BALL'') sentence trials.