Grasping the Agent's Perspective: A Kinematics Investigation of Linguistic Perspective in Italian and German

Neurophysiological mechanisms of perspective-taking: An MEG investigation of agency

According to the embodied cognition framework, sensory and motor areas are recruited during language understanding through simulation processes. Behavioral and imaging findings point to a dependence of the latter on perspective-taking (e.g., first person "I" versus third person "s/he"). The current study aims at identifying possible neurophysiological correlates of perspective in a linguistic context. Twenty healthy participants were measured with magnetoencephalography (MEG) while semantically processing visually presented inflected German verbs in the first- and third-person perspective, simple present tense. Results show that the first-person perspective induces stronger beta (15-25 Hz) desynchronization in the right-hemispheric posterior superior temporal sulcus, ventral posterior cingulate gyrus, and V5/MT+ area; no modulation of sensorimotor cortex emerged. Moreover, a stronger event-related field (ERF) was observed for the first-person perspective at about 150 ms after pronoun-verb onset, originating in occipital and moving to central and left temporal cortical sites. No effect of perspective on sensory gating was found when targeting the N1 component related to tones following the linguistic stimuli. Results indicate an effect of linguistic perspective-taking on brain activation patterns. The contribution of the single brain areas and their role in self-other distinction is further discussed.

Perspective in the conceptualization of categories

The ability to differently perceive and represent entities depending on their perspective is crucial for humans. We report five experiments that investigate how the different perspectives adopted while experiencing entities are reflected in conceptualizations (towards vs. away, near vs. far, beside vs. above, inside vs. outside and vision vs. audition vs. touch). Different groups of participants generated object properties while imagining the same scenario from different perspectives (e.g. entities coming toward them/going away from them while on a highway overpass). If conceptualizations have perspectives, then participants should produce features from a perspective entrenched in memory that reflects typical interactions with objects, independently of their assigned perspective (entrenched perspective). In addition, the perspective adopted in a given experiment should influence the properties generated (situated perspective). Results across the experiments indicate that conceptualizations contain both entrenched and situational perspectives. While entrenched perspectives emerge from canonical actions typically performed with objects, locations and entities, situational perspectives reflect online adaptations to current task contexts. The implications of the interplay between entrenched and situational perspectives for grounded cognition are discussed.