Abstract
The sensory and motor systems jointly contribute to complex behaviors, but whether motor systems are involved in high-order perceptual tasks such as speech and auditory comprehension remain debated. Here, we show that ocular muscle activity is synchronized to mentally constructed sentences during speech listening, in the absence of any sentence-related visual or prosodic cue. Ocular tracking of sentences is observed in the vertical electrooculogram (EOG), whether the eyes are open or closed, and in eye blinks measured by eyetracking. Critically, the phase of sentence-tracking ocular activity is strongly modulated by temporal attention, i.e., which word in a sentence is attended. Ocular activity also tracks high-level structures in non-linguistic auditory and visual sequences, and captures rapid fluctuations in temporal attention. Ocular tracking of non-visual rhythms possibly reflects global neural entrainment to task-relevant temporal structures across sensory and motor areas, which could serve to implement temporal attention and coordinate cortical networks.
Highlights
The sensory and motor systems jointly contribute to complex behaviors, but whether motor systems are involved in high-order perceptual tasks such as speech and auditory comprehension remain debated
Studies on sensory processing have proposed that selective information processing in time, i.e., temporal attention, is implemented by low-frequency neural oscillations in the sensorimotor system[28,29,30], and can be facilitated by overt movements[2,31,32,33]
Using a series of experiment involving speech, non-speech sound sequences, and visual sequences, we show that eye activity is synchronized to high-level structures in sensory sequences and is modulated by temporal attention
Summary
The sensory and motor systems jointly contribute to complex behaviors, but whether motor systems are involved in high-order perceptual tasks such as speech and auditory comprehension remain debated. Studies on sensory processing have proposed that selective information processing in time, i.e., temporal attention, is implemented by low-frequency neural oscillations in the sensorimotor system[28,29,30], and can be facilitated by overt movements[2,31,32,33]. Neurophysiological evidence supporting this hypothesis mostly comes from studies on complex scenes consisting of multiple sensory sequences, which show that cortical activity is preferentially synchronized to the attended sensory sequence[34,35]. E.g., a speech stream, it remains to be established whether the phase of sensorimotor activity is locked to the units that are preferentially processed, and whether such activity can modulate muscle activity
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