Neural Adaptation Effects in Conceptual Processing.

Barbara Marino,Lucia Riggio,Luca Gemmi,Anna Borghi,Cristina Cacciari

doi:10.3390/bs5030353

Abstract

We investigated the conceptual processing of nouns referring to objects characterized by a highly typical color and orientation. We used a go/no-go task in which we asked participants to categorize each noun as referring or not to natural entities (e.g., animals) after a selective adaptation of color-edge neurons in the posterior LV4 region of the visual cortex was induced by means of a McCollough effect procedure. This manipulation affected categorization: the green-vertical adaptation led to slower responses than the green-horizontal adaptation, regardless of the specific color and orientation of the to-be-categorized noun. This result suggests that the conceptual processing of natural entities may entail the activation of modality-specific neural channels with weights proportional to the reliability of the signals produced by these channels during actual perception. This finding is discussed with reference to the debate about the grounded cognition view.

Highlights

In the last decades, an increasing number of functional neuroimaging, neurophysiologic, and behavioral studies have provided support for the grounded cognition view whose main theoretical assumption is that conceptual processing makes use of the same neural systems that mediate perception and action
We investigated the conceptual processing of nouns referring to natural objects characterized by highly typical colors and orientations when the noun presentation was preceded by a selective adaptation of color-edge sensitive neurons in posterior LV4 region of the visual cortex
We found that the conceptual processing of the participants of Group 2 was unaffected by the adaptation strength

Summary

Introduction

An increasing number of functional neuroimaging, neurophysiologic, and behavioral studies have provided support for the grounded cognition view whose main theoretical assumption is that conceptual processing makes use of the same neural systems that mediate perception and action (for empirical reviews and theoretical discussions see [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]). Evidence in support of grounded cognition showed that the comprehension of action-related words and sentences is associated to a fast and somatotopic activation in motor and pre-motor cortices (e.g., [11,12,13]). Research has shown a modality-specific recruitment of sensory-neural subsystems in comprehension and conceptual retrieval of linguistic materials. The engagement of modality-specific neural areas while processing perception-related concepts is supported by behavioral studies indicating that perceptual phenomena arise in conceptual retrieval. Verifying the properties of concepts incurs in costs, to what happens during perceptual processing when switching between one perceptual modality to another (e.g., [16])

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Conclusion