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Cardona JF, Kargieman L, Sinay V, Gershanik O, Gelormini C, Amoruso L, Roca M, Pineda D, Trujillo N, Michon M, García AM, Szenkman D, Bekinschtein T, Manes F, Ibáñez A. How embodied is action language? Neurological evidence from motor diseases. Cognition 2014; 131:311-22. [PMID: 24594627 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.02.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 67] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/02/2013] [Revised: 01/15/2014] [Accepted: 02/04/2014] [Indexed: 11/25/2022]
Abstract
Although motor-language coupling is now being extensively studied, its underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. In this sense, a crucial opposition has emerged between the non-representational and the representational views of embodiment. The former posits that action language is grounded on the non-brain motor system directly engaged by musculoskeletal activity - i.e., peripheral involvement of ongoing actions. Conversely, the latter proposes that such grounding is afforded by the brain's motor system - i.e., activation of neural areas representing motor action. We addressed this controversy through the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) paradigm, which induces a contextual coupling of motor actions and verbal processing. ACEs were measured in three patient groups - early Parkinson's disease (EPD), neuromyelitis optica (NMO), and acute transverse myelitis (ATM) patients - as well as their respective healthy controls. NMO and ATM constitute models of injury to non-brain motor areas and the peripheral motor system, whereas EPD provides a model of brain motor system impairment. In our study, EPD patients exhibited impaired ACE and verbal processing relative to healthy participants, NMO, and ATM patients. These results indicate that the processing of action-related words is mainly subserved by a cortico-subcortical motor network system, thus supporting a brain-based embodied view on action language. More generally, our findings are consistent with contemporary perspectives for which action/verb processing depends on distributed brain networks supporting context-sensitive motor-language coupling.
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Affiliation(s)
- Juan F Cardona
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina; School of Psychology, Catholic University of Pereira (UCP), Risaralda, Colombia
| | - Lucila Kargieman
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - Vladimiro Sinay
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - Oscar Gershanik
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - Carlos Gelormini
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - Lucia Amoruso
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - María Roca
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - David Pineda
- Neuroscience Research Programme, University of Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia
| | - Natalia Trujillo
- Neuroscience Research Programme, University of Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia
| | - Maëva Michon
- UDP-INECO Foundation Core on Neuroscience (UIFCoN), Diego Portales University, Santiago, Chile
| | - Adolfo M García
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - Daniela Szenkman
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
| | - Tristán Bekinschtein
- Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Medical Research Council, Cambridge CB2 7EF, United Kingdom
| | - Facundo Manes
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina; Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, NSW, Australia
| | - Agustín Ibáñez
- Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina; UDP-INECO Foundation Core on Neuroscience (UIFCoN), Diego Portales University, Santiago, Chile; Universidad Autónoma del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia.
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Gleichgerrcht E, Torralva T, Roca M, Szenkman D, Ibanez A, Richly P, Pose M, Manes F. Decision making cognition in primary progressive aphasia. Behav Neurol 2011; 25:45-52. [PMID: 22207422 PMCID: PMC5294273 DOI: 10.3233/ben-2012-0352] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Download PDF] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/15/2022] Open
Abstract
We sought to investigate the decision making profile of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) by assessing patients diagnosed with this disease (n = 10), patients diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, n = 35), and matched controls (n = 14) using the Iowa Gambling Task, a widely used test that mimics real-life decision making. Participants were also evaluated with a complete neuropsychological battery. Patients with PPA were unable to adopt an advantageous strategy on the IGT, which resulted in a flat performance, different to that exhibited by both controls (who showed advantageous decision making) and bvFTD patients (who showed risk-appetitive behavior). The decision making profile of PPA patients was not associated with performance on language tasks and did not differ between sub-variants of the disease (namely, semantic dementia and progressive nonfluent aphasia). Investigating decision making in PPA is crucial both from a theoretical perspective, as it can shed light about the way in which language interacts with other cognitive functions, as well as a clinical standpoint, as it could lead to a more objective detection of impairments of decision making deficits in this condition.
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