搜索结果：Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior

For decades, theorizing in the cognitive sciences was dominated by the assumption that abstract concepts, lacking directly perceivable referents, can only be represented and processed through amodal or verbal linguistic representations. More recently, refined hybrid grounded cognition theories have successfully been applied to account for abstract concepts within a multiple representation framework. According to this perspective, the meaning of abstract concepts is constituted by representations distributed across various experiential modal brain systems, including sensory, motor, emotional, mentalizing, and social interaction networks. Representations in these modal systems are complemented by representations in language-related and amodal hub regions, depending on the specific semantic content of the concept. In this article, we first outline a multiple representation framework within a hybrid grounded cognition approach and then review neuroscientific evidence concerning the neural substrate of abstract concepts related to sensory-motor features, mental states and social constellations. These findings indicate that modal sensory-motor, mentalizing, and social interaction brain systems contribute to the processing of particular types of abstract concepts, alongside representations in amodal semantic hub regions and language areas. Moreover, this body of research demonstrates that different modal neural circuits are engaged as a function of a concept's specific semantic content, thereby highlighting the heterogeneity of abstract concepts. Future research should address outstanding questions, including the precise functional contributions of distinct neural circuits to the representation of abstract concepts and the evaluation of predicted patterns of impairment in neurological and psychiatric patient populations.

We report the case of a 58-year-old right-handed patient who presented with diagonistic dyspraxia of the left hand accompanied by various callosal disconnection symptoms, resulting from infarct lesions involving the right centrum semiovale as well as the corpus callosum. In addition to unintentionally performing actions opposite to those of the right hand, the left hand also exhibited movements identical to the right hand, movements unrelated to right-hand actions, and movements that preceded right-hand actions. Furthermore, the patient occasionally demonstrated symptoms not previously reported in classic diagonistic dyspraxia: the left hand involuntarily grasped objects despite the absence of pathological grasping, became unable to intentionally release grasped objects or, conversely, immediately released held objects. In linguistic tests conducted separately for each hand, errors such as the addition of actions were observed exclusively in the left hand, not only during the verbal command task but also when imitating the demonstrated actions included in the verbal commands, which did not require linguistic processing. The involuntary movements of the left hand observed in this patient suggest a dual disconnection mechanism: interhemispheric disconnection due to callosal lesions and intrahemispheric disconnection between the frontal and parietal lobes. The latter may contribute to impaired coordination between action inhibition and facilitation mechanisms as a result of disrupted association fibers caused by lesions in the right centrum semiovale.

Action control theories propose that both perceptual and action-related features of an action episode are temporarily bound together into event-files. When one of these features reappears, the corresponding event-file is retrieved, which can either facilitate or interfere with current performance depending on whether the retrieved and the current features match. Typically, partial repetitions of an event-file lead to slower responses and increased error rates compared to complete repetitions or complete changes (this phenomenon is labeled the 'binding effect'). The present study (n = 49) examined how perceptual salience influences the integration and retrieval of stimulus features within such event-files. Participants performed a sequential task in which an initially irrelevant stimulus could later become relevant, allowing us to assess how salience during binding shapes subsequent retrieval processes. Behaviorally, stronger binding effects emerged when the initially irrelevant stimulus had been salient compared to when it had been non-salient. At the neural level, this modulation was mirrored by enhanced theta-band activity over parieto-occipital regions during the probe display, consistent with the engagement of cognitive control mechanisms during event-file retrieval. Source localization further indicated that this theta modulation involved cingulate and supplementary motor areas, supporting their role in resolving interference between competing responses. Together, these findings suggest that perceptual salience strengthens the integration of stimulus features into event-files and/or event-file retrieval, enhancing subsequent retrieval-related conflict, observable both in behavioral performance and oscillatory activity.

Observing others' actions and imagining oneself performing the same actions (motor imagery) have been linked in the literature in several ways. They have been shown to have overlapping neural representations, both seem to relate to one's ability to move, and both have been shown to positively affect movement rehabilitation. Whether these overlaps reflect a direct functional relationship between motor imagery and the ability to derive relevant information from observed kinematics (action understanding) has not yet been investigated. A previous study found that individuals with low self-reported imagery vividness exhibit weaker motor system engagement during action observation than those with typical imagery vividness. The present study provides the first behavioural test of the relationships between motor and general visual imagery vividness and a quantifiable behavioural measure of action understanding-specifically, the ability to judge the weight of objects based on observing someone else lift them. To test the research question across the full imagery spectrum, our recruitment strategy included a high proportion of individuals with very low imagery vividness (often referred to as 'aphantasia'). An online sample (N = 392) completed a weight judgement task alongside a matched speed judgement control task. Neither motor imagery vividness (Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire-2) nor general visual imagery vividness (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) predicted action understanding, with a Bayesian analysis suggesting moderate evidence against any relationship. Overall, our findings suggest that self-reported motor and general visual imagery vividness are functionally independent from action understanding of manual interactions.

Trust requires balancing potential mutual gain against possible betrayal. This decision depends not only on personal vulnerability to loss (risk) but also on the partner's incentive to betray (temptation) and whether the betrayal is committed intentionally (partner's agency). Previous research-limited by categorical behavioral designs and a neuroimaging focus on pathological mistrust-leaves it unclear how the brain systematically represents personal risk, partner's temptation, and partner's agency during typical trust decisions. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging with a parametric binary trust game to disentangle the effects of these factors. Thirty-one participants made binary trust decisions while these factors were systematically varied. Behaviorally, trust declined with increasing risk and with the risk × temptation interaction, owing to self-centered heuristics, while agency had no reliable effect. Neurally, risk was encoded in a decision-dependent manner: increasing risk in trust engaged the salience network (anterior mid-cingulate cortex), whereas in non-trust it recruited striato-motor circuits (putamen, motor cortex). Temptation, in interaction with risk, was represented independently of choice, expressed as increased activity in Calcarine but reduced activity in the medial prefrontal hub of the default mode network. Agency was distinguished neurally in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex despite absent behavioral effects. Exploratory analyses showed that trust versus non-trust engaged distinct large-scale networks, with trust recruiting the central-executive and salience networks and non-trust the posterior default-mode network. These findings reveal distinct neural signatures for vulnerability, partner incentives, and partner agency in trust decisions, highlighting how self- and other-focused factors are encoded differently across large-scale brain networks.

Proactive control describes preparatory, anticipatory processes prior to upcoming demands, whereas reactive control is recruited as a late, corrective response to goal interferences. Here, we used fMRI to investigate behavioral and neuronal correlates of proactive and reactive control in major depressive disorder (MDD). Fifty patients and 50 healthy controls performed an antisaccade task with trial-specific central cues informing about the probability of upcoming task demands (antisaccade or prosaccade), thereby manipulating proactive control levels in the cue period. The trial-specific task instruction was contained in the peripheral stimulus, resulting in either congruent or incongruent trials in the saccadic response period to tax reactive control. Saccade stimuli were faces, with differently valenced expressions (negative, positive, neutral) allowing block-wise affective manipulation. Results indicated comparable effects of cue period proactive control in both groups in fronto-parieto-occipital cortex and striatum, including medial frontal and supplementary eye fields. In the response period, incongruent trials evoked enhanced activations in fronto-cingular, parietal and temporal cortex, thalamus and striatum, again without group differences. However, patients with MDD had larger antisaccade amplitudes and lower saccadic peak velocities. Exploratory analysis of a posterior parietal region-of-interest known to be related to non-standard sensorimotor transformations in antisaccades indicated reduced BOLD in patients during the response phase. There were no effects of stimulus valence on any measure. Together, these findings support the role of overlapping fronto-parieto-striatal networks in proactive and reactive control and suggest that in this particular task, such activations may be unaffected by stimulus-induced affective states as well as clinically relevant affective disorder.

Psychological distress is common among people living with neurodegenerative diseases of the motor system (NDMS) such as Parkinson's disease, motor neurone disease/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and Huntington's disease. Yet the way psychological difficulties are conceptualised in these populations is heavily shaped by medicalised language. Terms such as 'non-motor symptoms' and 'neuropsychiatric manifestations' were originally introduced to draw attention to difficulties beyond movement changes but they now risk positioning mood, anxiety, apathy, and related experiences solely as direct manifestations of neurological degeneration. This framing can obscure the rich psychosocial contexts in which distress arises, blur distinctions between emotional responses and disease processes, and reinforce deficit-based and disease-focused understandings that privilege biological explanations over person-centred ones. It may also influence clinical communication, treatment decisions, help-seeking behaviour, and access to psychological therapy and psychosocial interventions, contributing to inequities in care. This article argues that linguistic choices are not neutral: they construct the boundaries of what counts as legitimate knowledge, shape expectations about causality, and delimit the interventions considered appropriate. Without critical attention to these assumptions, individuals may experience distress as biologically inevitable and clinicians may overlook psychosocial contributors that are amenable to change. We propose that greater awareness of the power of language, coupled with empirical investigation into its effects, is essential for developing a linguistic reformulation of psychological distress in NDMS and more holistic, contextually grounded approaches to supporting psychological wellbeing.

Regularization has been extensively used in multivariate pattern classification (MVPA; decoding) of EEG data to mitigate the risk of overfitting. N-fold cross-validation is also used to mitigate this risk, and it is often combined with averaging across trials to improve the SNR. However, the impact of different regularization and cross-validation parameters on decoding performance remains unclear. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of variations in the support vector machine (SVM) regularization parameter (C) and the number of crossfolds (and the number of trials per average) on the performance of SVM-based decoding analyses. To achieve this, we examined the decoding performance in relatively simple binary classification tasks from seven commonly used event-related potential paradigms (N170, mismatch negativity, N2pc, P3b, N400, lateralized readiness potential, and error-related negativity). Additionally, we evaluated the decoding performance in more challenging multiclass tasks, including decoding face identity, facial expression, stimulus location, and stimulus orientation. The results revealed that both decoding accuracy and effect size were highest when the regularization strength was equal to or greater than 1. Furthermore, using between 3 and 5 folds with at least 10 trials per average yielded optimal decoding performance in most cases. Researchers applying SVM-based decoding to datasets similar to those examined here-in terms of population, recording systems, class numbers, and paradigms-might benefit from using the parameters that we found to be optimal here.

The clinical evaluation of semantic knowledge has predominantly relied on tools targeting concrete concepts, whereas abstract knowledge has historically received limited attention despite its importance in everyday communication. Only a few instruments have explored the internal subdivision of abstract knowledge, likely due to the intrinsic difficulty of defining specific types of concepts or dimensions, resulting in a fragmented and heterogeneous neuropsychological assessment framework that limits our understanding of this domain. This systematic review examined the tools used to assess various types of abstract concepts in clinical populations. A literature search has been performed on the electronic databases of PubMed and Google Scholar (last update: October 2025). A total of 17 tests is reviewed, differing in the test characteristics, i.e. ranging from automatic to controlled processes and varying in ecological validity, the type of stimuli employed, and the abstract dimensions explored. Most studies have focused on neurodegenerative patients, while comparatively few have examined other clinical conditions. The risk of bias of the reviewed studies was assessed using an ad hoc developed instrument. This review highlights the need for future research to extend investigations to additional abstract domains and clinical populations, while also identifying key challenges related to stimulus selection and the determination of the most appropriate assessment framework.

This review evaluates the diagnostic quality of the redundant target paradigm (RTP) as a tool for assessing residual visual capacities, like blindsight, in patients with visual field defects following brain injury. The RTP is based on the redundant target effect (RTE), whereby reaction times are slower to a single than to two redundant targets. In patients, the RTE indicates residual vision when the redundant target is presented within the blind field. By synthesizing data from the reviewed studies, we estimated measures of diagnostic quality. The specificity estimate was 89% [95%CI (69%, 97%)], indicating false-positive results were infrequent. Thus, a significant RTE suggests residual vision with high probability. However, sensitivity ranged from 42% [95%CI (19%, 68%)] to 77% [95%CI (57%, 90%)], showing that the RTP frequently fails to detect residual vision. The estimated reliability was low, with only 36% [95%CI (15%, 65%)] of cases demonstrating stable positive results. Therefore, absence of a significant RTE does not reliably indicate absence of residual vision. These findings limit the RTP's suitability to draw conclusions about specific neuronal structures or functions. Moreover, several patients exhibited blindsight in other paradigms but not in the RTP. Consequently, RTP-results cannot serve as a prerequisite for interpreting other blindsight tasks. The RTP's advantages, e.g., its ability to assess residual vision indirectly through a reaction-time effect, thereby avoiding biased response criteria, should encourage further research aimed at developing RTP-versions with improved diagnostic quality. However, low sensitivity and low reliability of current RTP-versions substantially limit its applicability for blindsight testing.

A growing body of literature has characterized the extensive and widespread engagement of cortical resources during the execution of locomotor adaptations. However, evidence suggests that the extent of cortical regulation involved in such adaptations is modulated by the available time to respond. In this study, a treadmill-based virtual reality paradigm was used to examine the electrocortical oscillations associated with obstacle avoidance under short versus long available response times (ARTs). Electroencephalography data were recorded from healthy young adults as they stepped over virtual obstacles. These obstacles were presented in far space, allowing either a short (1.5 sec) or long (4 sec) ART between their presentation and clearance. Data were parsed with independent component analysis and clustered within the prefrontal, sensorimotor, parietal and occipital regions. Distinct spectral signatures were observed across all cortical regions, characterized by transient synchronizations shortly after obstacle presentation and immediately prior to clearance. Compared to the long ART condition, the short ART condition elicited stronger prefrontal theta, alpha, and beta synchronizations. During clearance, long ARTs were associated with a sensorimotor alpha desynchronization during obstacle clearance; however, such desynchronization was largely absent under short ART. Taken together, these findings suggest that tighter temporal constraints during obstacle avoidance enhance prefrontal involvement and decrease sensorimotor network activation. Such time-dependent cortical dynamics offer new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying locomotor adjustments that can inform our understanding of locomotor deficits in aging and neurological disorders.

The Arabic Discourse Assessment Tool (ADAT) is a newly developed, standardised, and norm-referenced tool comprising three discourse tasks, eight high-quality discourse measures, and two transcription-less assessment approaches. ADAT can accurately differentiate discourse responses produced by people with aphasia (PwA) from those of neurotypical adults. In this study, we examined the diagnostic accuracy of ADAT in patients with brain damage. We addressed key methodological limitations in the existing literature by: (a) using ADAT to distinguish brain damaged PwA from those without aphasia; (b) diagnosing fluency status among PwA using ADAT; (c) testing the predictive validity of the tool in out-of-sample data; and (d) assessing whether transcription-less discourse assessment approaches can produce similar diagnostic accuracy to traditional, time-consuming discourse sampling. We examined 100 patients with brain damage using ADAT; 50 of whom were diagnosed with aphasia (28 fluent and 22 non-fluent aphasia). Using random-permutation nested cross-validation and bootstrapping, the study demonstrates that the combination of eight ADAT discourse measures can predict aphasia status in brain damaged patients with 90% accuracy, and the two transcription-less, clinically-friendly discourse assessment approaches can predict aphasia status with 88% accuracy. Furthermore, ADAT's discourse measures can diagnose fluency status in PwA with 81% accuracy, and the two transcription-less approaches can diagnose fluency status with 88% accuracy. The findings provide evidence that ADAT, including its discourse measures and transcription-less approaches, can be used to diagnose aphasia in brain damaged individuals and fluency status in PwA with very high accuracy, thus offering clinical applications for early identification and targeted interventions.

Tool use and physical reasoning are often assumed to rely on shared cognitive and neural mechanisms. At some level, this correspondence is expected: using an object typically requires understanding its physical properties. However, both capacities are complex and multicomponential, so the relationship between them may vary across levels of representation and task demands. Here, we asked whether third-person physical reasoning about object dynamics can dissociate from tool use (i.e., performing a tool's typical action) in individuals with left-hemisphere stroke. We tested 11 patients, five of whom showed impairments in tool use. Physical reasoning was assessed using a novel collection of tasks probing judgments about mass, velocity, and timing across static and dynamic scenes. Tool use was evaluated using a classic gesture-to-sight task, a pantomime-based measure in which participants are shown pictures of familiar tools and asked to demonstrate how each would be used. We identified an individual-level dissociation: patient I.A.∗ showed impairment in gesturing the use of objects despite preserved physical reasoning, often outperforming neurotypical controls. This pattern was complemented by patient N.P., who showed the reverse profile, with intact tool use gestures but difficulties in some physical reasoning tasks. These findings suggest that the ability to reason about the physical world and tool use can dissociate behaviorally and be independently disrupted by brain damage. This challenges the view that physical reasoning and tool use draw on the same underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms and suggests that at least some of their components are distinct. ∗ Both initials I.A. and N.P. are pseudonyms used to protect participant identities.

The Sense of Agency (SoA), the subjective experience that 'I am in control of my actions', has been proposed to involve both early implicit sensorimotor processes (feeling of agency) and later explicit higher-level processes (judgment of agency). Even though SoA is fundamental to our interactions with the external world and to our construct of the self, its underlying neural mechanism remains elusive. In this pre-registered EEG study, we used time-frequency analysis and Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) to investigate the neural characteristics of sensorimotor conflicts within an agency paradigm. Using an established embodied virtual reality paradigm, we modulated visual feedback to examine neural responses to conflicts between predicted and perceived sensory feedback. Participants moved their finger while viewing a virtual hand that either mimicked their movement, differed anatomically (identical movement, different finger), or spatially (identical finger, angular shift), and then rated their SoA while brain activity was recorded. In accordance with our pre-registered hypothesis, visuomotor conflicts, which were associated with robust decreases in self-attribution, were linked to increased alpha-band power, and exploratory analyses further revealed increased theta-band power. We show that trials containing a sensorimotor alteration could be reliably decoded from unaltered trials with up to 68% accuracy starting around 200 msec after movement onset. Cross-decoding further revealed shared neural patterns across anatomical and spatial manipulations, emerging around 500 msec post-movement. Together, our results indicate a temporal progression from early, condition-specific sensorimotor responses to a later domain-general component, consistent with the two-step model of agency.

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) show alterations in empathic abilities, potentially involving automatic simulation processes supported by mirror-like mechanisms in the somatosensory domain. Within the tactile mirror system (TaMS), observing touch on another person's body activates cortical regions involved in tactile perception, including the primary somatosensory cortex (S1). Although mirror-like alterations have been suggested in BPD, the underlying mechanisms of plasticity remain underexplored. Here, we used a cross-modal paired associative stimulation (cm-PAS) protocol to investigate the plasticity mechanisms of TaMS functioning in BPD. Twenty-four individuals with BPD and 24 healthy controls (HCs) were included. Empathic abilities were assessed using self-report questionnaires. Participants performed tactile acuity and visuo-tactile spatial congruity (VTSC) tasks before and after a cm-PAS protocol. During cm-PAS, images of a hand being touched were paired with transcranial magnetic stimulation over the S1. The effects of cm-PAS were assessed on tactile acuity, as an index of S1 activity, and VTSC performance, as an index of TaMS functioning. Preregistered analyses revealed that patients with BPD tended to have lower cognitive empathy than HCs, with no significant cm-PAS effects on tactile acuity or VTSC performance in HCs, precluding between-group comparisons of plasticity effects. Exploratory analyses were conducted to further investigate potential sources of variability in the effects of cm-PAS, as well as the relationship between cognitive empathy and visuo-tactile processing as measure of TaMS functioning.

Visual symmetry activates the extrastriate visual cortex and generates an Event Related Potential (ERP) called the Sustained Posterior Negativity (SPN). SPN amplitude is often reduced when stimuli are presented in perspective. We call this reduction SPN perspective cost. Previous research has shown that SPN perspective cost is flexible. We examined flexibility in SPN perspective cost by comparing three experimental conditions in three separate blocks. In the frontoparallel block, the stimuli were seen face on. In the real perspective block, the physical monitor was rotated with respect to the participant's line of sight, so the stimuli were viewed from an unconventional angle. In the drawn perspective block, the physical monitor was not rotated, but the stimuli were drawn as if viewed from the same unconventional angle. The same group of 72 participants completed all three blocks. As predicted, the SPN was selectively reduced in the drawn perspective block. We conclude that when sufficient visual depth cues are available, the brain can construct a view invariant representation. This is an important step forward in the wider research project to determine when different forms of perceptual organization happen.

Human perception relies on bottom-up sensory input and top-down prior knowledge, and object recognition is known to be modulated by the semantic relationship between objects and their surrounding context. However, the dynamic processing mechanism during object recognition and the resulting interaction between top-down and bottom-up factors remains unclear. The present study investigated how stimulus contrast modulates the effect of scene-object semantic congruency. Participants performed an object-recognition task in which target objects of high or low contrast appeared within semantically congruent or in congruent natural scenes. In Experiment 1, behavioral results (N= 73) on recognition accuracy revealed a congruency benefit for high-contrast objects and an incongruency benefit for low-contrast objects, indicating a contrast-dependent shift in how scene context influences recognition. Experiment 2 (N= 19) employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neural activity of these effects. For high-contrast targets, congruency effects emerged in the N300 and N400 over central-parietal regions, and in the P600 over frontal sites. For low-contrast targets, effects were observed in the late component. These findings provide novel evidence that low-level visual contrast determines whether prior knowledge facilitates or interferes with object recognition, offering critical insights into the mechanisms underlying the dynamic interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes in visual perception.

To date, neurobiological accounts of lexical-semantic processing have largely assumed, either explicitly or implicitly, that there is no relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Recently, multiple representation theories have begun to incorporate non-arbitrary relationships in which a word's form resembles its meaning (iconicity). However, non-arbitrary form-meaning relationships occur more extensively within languages as statistical regularities between sublexical phonological/phonetic features and aspects of word meaning (systematicity or typicality). The present study investigated whether brain activity during lexical processing reflects statistical regularities between sublexical features and concrete and abstract concepts (i.e., concreteness form typicality). Twenty-one healthy participants completed an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study while they performed auditory lexical decisions on concrete and abstract words that were highly form-typical. We observed significant activity in a predominantly left-hemisphere network of perisylvian regions previously linked to concrete and abstract word processing. Crucially, the majority of these regions also responded to nonwords constructed with sublexical phonological/phonetic features associated with concreteness, including hub regions proposed to represent amodal conceptual processing. These findings demonstrate that statistical knowledge about non-arbitrary form-meaning mappings constitutes a core component of how concreteness is represented and accessed in the brain. We argue that these results support an account in which concrete and abstract concepts are grounded in the phonetic-acoustic features of language through statistical learning.

Body perception and movement control are altered in most neurological, neurodegenerative, and psychiatric diseases. The homuncular organization of the sensorimotor cortex, referring to the regular organization of neurons responsive to body movement and body touch, is therefore of fundamental relevance for brain health. Developmental changes of homuncular readouts, such as during aging and neurodegeneration, relate to mechanisms of resilience against cognitive, emotional, and behavioural decline. Recent advances in ultra-high field MRI allow the in-vivo parcellation of cortical areas. Based on mesoscale profiles, this method has been used to evidence the existence of distinct cortical fields within the homuncular map, each representing a major body part and, and borders between these fields. This topographic "split" defines new units of homuncular network organization and questions the idea that mechanisms of neurodegeneration or plasticity detected in one area of the sensorimotor cortex transfer to other areas within the topographic map. In-vivo brain parcellation that allows the definition of these units in individual patients provides a novel and unique perspective on brain health that support an individualized investigation of affected circuits.