TY - JOUR
T1 - Sensorimotor experience and verb-category mapping in human sensory, motor and parietal neurons
AU - Yang, Ying
AU - Dickey, Michael Walsh
AU - Fiez, Julie
AU - Murphy, Brian
AU - Mitchell, Tom
AU - Collinger, Jennifer
AU - Tyler-Kabara, Elizabeth
AU - Boninger, Michael
AU - Wang, Wei
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), UPMC Rehabilitation Institute. This work was developed with the funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Grants 3R01NS050256-05S1 and 8KL2TR000146), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program (SPAWAR Contract N66001-10-C-4056). This material is also supported in part by the Office of Research and Development, Rehabilitation Research & Development Service, VA Center of Excellence in Wheelchairs and Associated Rehab Engineering, Grant # B6789C. It is the result of work supported with resources and the use of facilities at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this article are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States Government. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We would like to thank Stephen Foldes, John Downey, Jeffery Weiss, Minas Abovyan, and Zhaohong Wu for their respective contributions in MRI image reconstruction, recording setup, and semantic feature coding.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017
PY - 2017/7
Y1 - 2017/7
N2 - Semantic grounding is the process of relating meaning to symbols (e.g., words). It is the foundation for creating a representational symbolic system such as language. Semantic grounding for verb meaning is hypothesized to be achieved through two mechanisms: sensorimotor mapping, i.e., directly encoding the sensorimotor experiences the verb describes, and verb-category mapping, i.e., encoding the abstract category a verb belongs to. These two mechanisms were investigated by examining neuronal-level spike (i.e. neuronal action potential) activities from the motor, somatosensory and parietal areas in two human participants. Motor and a portion of somatosensory neurons were found to be involved in primarily sensorimotor mapping, while parietal and some somatosensory neurons were found to be involved in both sensorimotor and verb-category mapping. The time course of the spike activities and the selective tuning pattern of these neurons indicate that they belong to a large neural network used for semantic processing. This study is the first step towards understanding how words are processed by neurons.
AB - Semantic grounding is the process of relating meaning to symbols (e.g., words). It is the foundation for creating a representational symbolic system such as language. Semantic grounding for verb meaning is hypothesized to be achieved through two mechanisms: sensorimotor mapping, i.e., directly encoding the sensorimotor experiences the verb describes, and verb-category mapping, i.e., encoding the abstract category a verb belongs to. These two mechanisms were investigated by examining neuronal-level spike (i.e. neuronal action potential) activities from the motor, somatosensory and parietal areas in two human participants. Motor and a portion of somatosensory neurons were found to be involved in primarily sensorimotor mapping, while parietal and some somatosensory neurons were found to be involved in both sensorimotor and verb-category mapping. The time course of the spike activities and the selective tuning pattern of these neurons indicate that they belong to a large neural network used for semantic processing. This study is the first step towards understanding how words are processed by neurons.
KW - Action verbs
KW - Concept-to-concept mapping
KW - Experience-to-concept mapping
KW - Human neuron spikes
KW - Semantic grounding
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85019731831&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.04.021
DO - 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.04.021
M3 - Article
C2 - 28575757
AN - SCOPUS:85019731831
VL - 92
SP - 304
EP - 319
JO - Cortex
JF - Cortex
SN - 0010-9452
ER -