Subject:
|
Action, intention, and motor control DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 1: Language and Communication DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 2: Perception, Action and Control Experimental Psychopathology and Treatment Psycholinguistics Radboudumc 3: Disorders of movement DCMN: Donders Center for Medical Neuroscience 110 000 Neurocognition of Language 110 007 PLUS: A neurocomputational model for the Processing of Linguistic Utterances based on the Unification-Space architecture 110 009 The human brain and Chinese prosody 110 012 Social cognition of verbal communication 110 013 Binding and the MUC-model 110 014 Public activities 111 000 Intention & Action 111 018 Prefrontal regulation of social behavior 111 035 The tempal dynamics of post-error adjustments: a Meg study DCN MP - Plasticity and memory |
Organization:
|
SW OZ DCC BO FSW_Fac. algemeen SW OZ BSI KLP SW OZ DCC PL SW OZ DCC CO Neurology |
Abstract:
|
Despite the ambiguity inherent in human communication, people are remarkably efficient in establishing mutual understanding. Studying how people communicate in novel settings provides a window into the mechanisms supporting the human competence to rapidly generate and understand novel shared symbols, a fundamental property of human communication. Previous work indicates that the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is involved when people understand the intended meaning of novel communicative actions. Here, we set out to test whether normal functioning of this cerebral structure is required for understanding novel communicative actions using inhibitory low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). A factorial experimental design contrasted two tightly matched stimulation sites (right pSTS vs left MT+, i.e., a contiguous homotopic task-relevant region) and tasks (a communicative task vs a visual tracking task that used the same sequences of stimuli). Overall task performance was not affected by rTMS, whereas changes in task performance over time were disrupted according to TMS site and task combinations. Namely, rTMS over pSTS led to a diminished ability to improve action understanding on the basis of recent communicative history, while rTMS over MT+ perturbed improvement in visual tracking over trials. These findings qualify the contributions of the right pSTS to human communicative abilities, showing that this region might be necessary for incorporating previous knowledge, accumulated during interactions with a communicative partner, to constrain the inferential process that leads to action understanding.
|