More Than Words: Extra-Sylvian Neuroanatomic Networks Support Indirect Speech Act Comprehension and Discourse in Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia.

Indirect speech acts-responding "I forgot to wear my watch today" to someone who asked for the time-are ubiquitous in daily conversation, but are understudied in current neurobiological models of language. To comprehend an indirect speech act like this one, listeners must not only decode the lexical-semantic content of the utterance, but also make a pragmatic, bridging inference. This inference allows listeners to derive the speaker's true, intended meaning-in the above dialog, for example, that the speaker cannot provide the time.

Cognitive and Neuroanatomic Accounts of Referential Communication in Focal Dementia.

The primary function of language is to communicate-that is, to make individuals reach a state of mutual understanding about a particular thought or idea. Accordingly, daily communication is truly a task of social coordination. Indeed, successful interactions require individuals to (1) track and adopt a partner's perspective and (2) continuously shift between the numerous elements relevant to the exchange.

Cognitive and Affective Perspective-Taking: Evidence for Shared and Dissociable Anatomical Substrates.

Perspective-taking refers to the ability to recognize another person's point of view. Crucial to the development of interpersonal relationships and prosocial behavior, perspective-taking is closely linked to human empathy, and like empathy, perspective-taking is commonly subdivided into cognitive and affective components. While the two components of empathy have been frequently compared, the differences between cognitive and affective perspective-taking have been under-investigated in the cognitive neuroscience literature to date.

Establishing zebrafish as a model to study the anxiolytic effects of scopolamine.

Scopolamine (hyoscine) is a muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist that has traditionally been used to treat motion sickness in humans. However, studies investigating depressed and bipolar populations have found that scopolamine is also effective at reducing depression and anxiety symptoms. The potential anxiety-reducing (anxiolytic) effects of scopolamine could have great clinical implications for humans; however, rats and mice administered scopolamine showed increased anxiety in standard behavioural tests.

Social Coordination in Older Adulthood: A Dual-Process Model.

Background/study Context: In a variety of collaborative circumstances, participants must adopt the perspective of a partner and establish a shared mental representation that helps mediate common understanding. This process is referred to as social coordination. Here, the authors investigate the effect of aging on social coordination and consider separately the component processes related to perspective-taking and working memory.

Processing ambiguity in a linguistic context: decision-making difficulties in non-aphasic patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration.

Some extent of ambiguity is ubiquitous in everyday conversations. For example, words have multiple meaning and very common pronouns, like "he" and "she" (anaphoric pronouns), have little meaning on their own and refer to a noun that has been previously introduced in the discourse. Ambiguity triggers a decision process that is not a subroutine of language processing but rather a more general domain resource.

Brain activity and connectivity during poetry composition: Toward a multidimensional model of the creative process.

Creativity, a multifaceted construct, can be studied in various ways, for example, investigating phases of the creative process, quality of the creative product, or the impact of expertise. Previous neuroimaging studies have assessed these individually. Believing that each of these interacting features must be examined simultaneously to develop a comprehensive understanding of creative behavior, we examined poetry composition, assessing process, product, and expertise in a single experiment.

Getting on the same page: the neural basis for social coordination deficits in behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration.

For social interactions to be successful, individuals must establish shared mental representations that allow them to reach a common understanding and "get on the same page". We refer to this process as social coordination. While examples of social coordination are ubiquitous in daily life, relatively little is known about the neuroanatomic basis of this complex behavior.

The processing of speech, gesture, and action during language comprehension.

Hand gestures and speech form a single integrated system of meaning during language comprehension, but is gesture processed with speech in a unique fashion? We had subjects watch multimodal videos that presented auditory (words) and visual (gestures and actions on objects) information. Half of the subjects related the audio information to a written prime presented before the video, and the other half related the visual information to the written prime. For half of the multimodal video stimuli, the audio and visual information contents were congruent, and for the other half, they were incongruent.