Network resonance and the auditory steady state response.

The auditory steady state response (ASSR) arises when periodic sounds evoke stable responses in auditory networks that reflect the acoustic characteristics of the stimuli, such as the amplitude of the sound envelope. Larger for some stimulus rates than others, the ASSR in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) is notably maximal for sounds modulated in amplitude at 40 Hz. To investigate the local circuit underpinnings of the large ASSR to 40 Hz amplitude-modulated (AM) sounds, we acquired skull EEG and local field potential (LFP) recordings from primary auditory cortex (A1) in the rat during the presentation of 20, 30, 40, 50, and 80 Hz AM tones.

Strong Prediction: Language Model Surprisal Explains Multiple N400 Effects.

Theoretical accounts of the N400 are divided as to whether the amplitude of the N400 response to a stimulus reflects the extent to which the stimulus was predicted, the extent to which the stimulus is semantically similar to its preceding context, or both. We use state-of-the-art machine learning tools to investigate which of these three accounts is best supported by the evidence. GPT-3, a neural language model trained to compute the conditional probability of any word based on the words that precede it, was used to operationalize contextual predictability.

Brain responses to a lab-evolved artificial language with space-time metaphors.

What is the connection between the cultural evolution of a language and the rapid processing response to that language in the brains of individual learners? In an iterated communication study that was conducted previously, participants were asked to communicate temporal concepts such as "tomorrow," "day after," "year," and "past" using vertical movements recorded on a touch screen. Over time, participants developed simple artificial 'languages' that used space metaphorically to communicate in nuanced ways about time. Some conventions appeared rapidly and universally (e.

Mimicry of partially occluded emotional faces: do we mimic what we see or what we know?

Facial electromyography (EMG) was used to investigate patterns of facial mimicry in response to partial facial expressions in two contexts that differ in how naturalistic and socially significant the faces are. Experiment 1 presented participants with either the upper- or lower-half of facial expressions and used a forced-choice emotion categorisation task. This task emphasises cognition at the expense of ecological and social validity.

Event related spectral perturbations of gesture congruity: Visuospatial resources are recruited for multimodal discourse comprehension.

Here we examine the role of visuospatial working memory (WM) during the comprehension of multimodal discourse with co-speech iconic gestures. EEG was recorded as healthy adults encoded either a sequence of one (low load) or four (high load) dot locations on a grid and rehearsed them until a free recall response was collected later in the trial. During the rehearsal period of the WM task, participants observed videos of a speaker describing objects in which half of the trials included semantically related co-speech gestures (congruent), and the other half included semantically unrelated gestures (incongruent).

Verbal working memory and co-speech gesture processing.

Multimodal discourse requires an assembly of cognitive processes that are uniquely recruited for language comprehension in social contexts. In this study, we investigated the role of verbal working memory for the online integration of speech and iconic gestures. Participants memorized and rehearsed a series of auditorily presented digits in low (one digit) or high (four digits) memory load conditions.

Dynamic grounding of emotion concepts.

Emotion concepts are important. They help us to understand, experience and predict human behaviour. Emotion concepts also link the realm of the abstract with the realm of bodily experience and actions.

Projectors, associators, visual imagery, and the time course of visual processing in grapheme-color synesthesia.

In grapheme-color synesthesia, seeing particular letters or numbers evokes the experience of specific colors. We investigate the brain's real-time processing of words in this population by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from 15 grapheme-color synesthetes and 15 controls as they judged the validity of word pairs ('yellow banana' vs. 'blue banana') presented under high and low visual contrast.

Sensorimotor simulation and emotion processing: Impairing facial action increases semantic retrieval demands.

Sensorimotor models suggest that understanding the emotional content of a face recruits a simulation process in which a viewer partially reproduces the facial expression in their own sensorimotor system. An important prediction of these models is that disrupting simulation should make emotion recognition more difficult. Here we used electroencephalogram (EEG) and facial electromyogram (EMG) to investigate how interfering with sensorimotor signals from the face influences the real-time processing of emotional faces.

Iconic Gestures Facilitate Discourse Comprehension in Individuals With Superior Immediate Memory for Body Configurations.

To understand a speaker's gestures, people may draw on kinesthetic working memory (KWM)-a system for temporarily remembering body movements. The present study explored whether sensitivity to gesture meaning was related to differences in KWM capacity. KWM was evaluated through sequences of novel movements that participants viewed and reproduced with their own bodies.

Facial Action and Emotional Language: ERP Evidence that Blocking Facial Feedback Selectively Impairs Sentence Comprehension.

There is a lively and theoretically important debate about whether, how, and when embodiment contributes to language comprehension. This study addressed these questions by testing how interference with facial action impacts the brain's real-time response to emotional language. Participants read sentences about positive and negative events (e.

How vertical hand movements impact brain activity elicited by literally and metaphorically related words: an ERP study of embodied metaphor.

Embodied metaphor theory suggests abstract concepts are metaphorically linked to more experientially basic ones and recruit sensorimotor cortex for their comprehension. To test whether words associated with spatial attributes reactivate traces in sensorimotor cortex, we recorded EEG from the scalp of healthy adults as they read words while performing a concurrent task involving either upward- or downward- directed arm movements. ERPs were time-locked to words associated with vertical space-either literally (ascend, descend) or metaphorically (inspire, defeat)-as participants made vertical movements that were either congruent or incongruent with the words.

Co-speech iconic gestures and visuo-spatial working memory.

Three experiments tested the role of verbal versus visuo-spatial working memory in the comprehension of co-speech iconic gestures. In Experiment 1, participants viewed congruent discourse primes in which the speaker's gestures matched the information conveyed by his speech, and incongruent ones in which the semantic content of the speaker's gestures diverged from that in his speech. Discourse primes were followed by picture probes that participants judged as being either related or unrelated to the preceding clip.

A psychometric measure of working memory capacity for configured body movement.

Working memory (WM) models have traditionally assumed at least two domain-specific storage systems for verbal and visuo-spatial information. We review data that suggest the existence of an additional slave system devoted to the temporary storage of body movements, and present a novel instrument for its assessment: the movement span task. The movement span task assesses individuals' ability to remember and reproduce meaningless configurations of the body.

Grammatical number agreement processing using the visual half-field paradigm: an event-related brain potential study.

Despite indications in the split-brain and lesion literatures that the right hemisphere is capable of some syntactic analysis, few studies have investigated right hemisphere contributions to syntactic processing in people with intact brains. Here we used the visual half-field paradigm in healthy adults to examine each hemisphere's processing of correct and incorrect grammatical number agreement marked either lexically, e.g.

Enhanced mental rotation ability in time-space synesthesia.

Time-space synesthesia is a variant of sequence-space synesthesia and involves the involuntary association of months of the year with 2D and 3D spatial forms, such as arcs, circles, and ellipses. Previous studies have revealed conflicting results regarding the association between time-space synesthesia and enhanced spatial processing ability. Here, we tested 15 time-space synesthetes, and 15 non-synesthetic controls matched for age, education, and gender on standard tests of mental rotation ability, spatial working memory, and verbal working memory.

Hemispheric asymmetry in interpreting novel literal language: an event-related potential study.

Conceptual mapping, or making connections between conceptual structure in different domains, is a key mechanism of creative language use whose neural underpinnings are not well understood. The present study involved the combination of event-related potentials (ERPs) with the divided visual field presentation technique to explore the relative contributions of the left and right hemispheres (LH and RH) to the construction of novel meanings in fully literal language. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded as healthy adults read sentences that supported either a conventional literal reading of the sentence final word ("His main method of transportation is a boat,"), or a novel literal meaning derived from conceptual mapping ("The clever boys used a cardboard box as a boat,").

Predictability and novelty in literal language comprehension: an ERP study.

Linguists have suggested that one mechanism for the creative extension of meaning in language involves mapping, or constructing correspondences between conceptual domains. For example, the sentence, "The clever boys used a cardboard box as a boat," sets up a novel mapping between the concepts cardboard box and boat, while "His main method of transportation is a boat," relies on a more conventional mapping between method of transportation and boat. To examine the electrophysiological signature of this mapping process, electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from the scalp as healthy adults read three sorts of sentences: low-cloze (unpredictable) conventional ("His main method of transportation is a boat,"), low-cloze novel mapp'ing ("The clever boys used a cardboard box as a boat,"), and high-cloze (predictable) conventional ("The only way to get around Venice is to navigate the canals in a boat,").

Handedness and calendar orientations in time-space synaesthesia.

In one common variant of time-space synaesthesia, individuals report the consistent experience of months bound to a spatial arrangement, commonly described as a circle extending outside of the body. Whereas the layout of these calendars has previously been thought to be relatively random and to differ greatly between synaesthetes, Study 1 provides the first evidence suggesting one critical aspect of these calendars is mediated by handedness: clockwise versus counter-clockwise orientation. A study of 34 time-space synaesthetes revealed a strong association between handedness and the orientation of circular calendars.

Are depictive gestures like pictures? commonalities and differences in semantic processing.

Conversation is multi-modal, involving both talk and gesture. Does understanding depictive gestures engage processes similar to those recruited in the comprehension of drawings or photographs? Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from neurotypical adults as they viewed spontaneously produced depictive gestures preceded by congruent and incongruent contexts. Gestures were presented either dynamically in short, soundless video-clips, or statically as freeze frames extracted from gesture videos.

Modality Switching in a Property Verification Task: An ERP Study of What Happens When Candles Flicker after High Heels Click.

The perceptual modalities associated with property words, such as flicker or click, have previously been demonstrated to affect subsequent property verification judgments (Pecher et al., 2003). Known as the conceptual modality switch effect, this finding supports the claim that brain systems for perception and action help subserve the representation of concepts.

Similarly shaped letters evoke similar colors in grapheme-color synesthesia.

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a neurological condition in which viewing numbers or letters (graphemes) results in the concurrent sensation of color. While the anatomical substrates underlying this experience are well understood, little research to date has investigated factors influencing the particular colors associated with particular graphemes or how synesthesia occurs developmentally. A recent suggestion of such an interaction has been proposed in the cascaded cross-tuning (CCT) model of synesthesia, which posits that in synesthetes connections between grapheme regions and color area V4 participate in a competitive activation process, with synesthetic colors arising during the component-stage of grapheme processing.

Spatial cueing in time-space synesthetes: An event-related brain potential study.

Some people report that they consistently and involuntarily associate time events, such as months of the year, with specific spatial locations; a condition referred to as time-space synesthesia. The present study investigated the manner in which such synesthetic time-space associations affect visuo-spatial attention via an endogenous cuing paradigm. Reaction times and ERPs were recorded as 12 time-space synesthetes and 12 control participants did a peripheral target detection task, cued by three different types of centrally presented cues: arrows pointing left or right, direction words "left" or "right", and month names associated with either the left or the right side of the synesthete's mental calendar (e.

Gestures modulate speech processing early in utterances.

Electroencephalogram was recorded as healthy adults viewed short videos of spontaneous discourse in which a speaker used depictive gestures to complement information expressed through speech. Event-related potentials were computed time-locked to content words in the speech stream and to subsequent related and unrelated picture probes. Gestures modulated event-related potentials to content words co-timed with the first gesture in a discourse segment, relative to the same words presented with static freeze frames of the speaker.