Action Priority: Early Neurophysiological Interaction of Conceptual and Motor Representations.

Handling our everyday life, we often react manually to verbal requests or instruction, but the functional interrelations of motor control and language are not fully understood yet, especially their neurophysiological basis. Here, we investigated whether specific motor representations for grip types...

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Main Authors: Dirk Koester, Thomas Schack
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2016-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5156427?pdf=render
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spelling doaj-9cd47140f660420687578aee4b29aabf2020-11-24T22:14:35ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032016-01-011112e016588210.1371/journal.pone.0165882Action Priority: Early Neurophysiological Interaction of Conceptual and Motor Representations.Dirk KoesterThomas SchackHandling our everyday life, we often react manually to verbal requests or instruction, but the functional interrelations of motor control and language are not fully understood yet, especially their neurophysiological basis. Here, we investigated whether specific motor representations for grip types interact neurophysiologically with conceptual information, that is, when reading nouns. Participants performed lexical decisions and, for words, executed a grasp-and-lift task on objects of different sizes involving precision or power grips while the electroencephalogram was recorded. Nouns could denote objects that require either a precision or a power grip and could, thus, be (in)congruent with the performed grasp. In a control block, participants pointed at the objects instead of grasping them. The main result revealed an event-related potential (ERP) interaction of grip type and conceptual information which was not present for pointing. Incongruent compared to congruent conditions elicited an increased positivity (100-200 ms after noun onset). Grip type effects were obtained in response-locked analyses of the grasping ERPs (100-300 ms at left anterior electrodes). These findings attest that grip type and conceptual information are functionally related when planning a grasping action but such an interaction could not be detected for pointing. Generally, the results suggest that control of behaviour can be modulated by task demands; conceptual noun information (i.e., associated action knowledge) may gain processing priority if the task requires a complex motor response.http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5156427?pdf=render
collection DOAJ
language English
format Article
sources DOAJ
author Dirk Koester
Thomas Schack
spellingShingle Dirk Koester
Thomas Schack
Action Priority: Early Neurophysiological Interaction of Conceptual and Motor Representations.
PLoS ONE
author_facet Dirk Koester
Thomas Schack
author_sort Dirk Koester
title Action Priority: Early Neurophysiological Interaction of Conceptual and Motor Representations.
title_short Action Priority: Early Neurophysiological Interaction of Conceptual and Motor Representations.
title_full Action Priority: Early Neurophysiological Interaction of Conceptual and Motor Representations.
title_fullStr Action Priority: Early Neurophysiological Interaction of Conceptual and Motor Representations.
title_full_unstemmed Action Priority: Early Neurophysiological Interaction of Conceptual and Motor Representations.
title_sort action priority: early neurophysiological interaction of conceptual and motor representations.
publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS)
series PLoS ONE
issn 1932-6203
publishDate 2016-01-01
description Handling our everyday life, we often react manually to verbal requests or instruction, but the functional interrelations of motor control and language are not fully understood yet, especially their neurophysiological basis. Here, we investigated whether specific motor representations for grip types interact neurophysiologically with conceptual information, that is, when reading nouns. Participants performed lexical decisions and, for words, executed a grasp-and-lift task on objects of different sizes involving precision or power grips while the electroencephalogram was recorded. Nouns could denote objects that require either a precision or a power grip and could, thus, be (in)congruent with the performed grasp. In a control block, participants pointed at the objects instead of grasping them. The main result revealed an event-related potential (ERP) interaction of grip type and conceptual information which was not present for pointing. Incongruent compared to congruent conditions elicited an increased positivity (100-200 ms after noun onset). Grip type effects were obtained in response-locked analyses of the grasping ERPs (100-300 ms at left anterior electrodes). These findings attest that grip type and conceptual information are functionally related when planning a grasping action but such an interaction could not be detected for pointing. Generally, the results suggest that control of behaviour can be modulated by task demands; conceptual noun information (i.e., associated action knowledge) may gain processing priority if the task requires a complex motor response.
url http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5156427?pdf=render
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