Concepts in context: Processing mental state concepts with internal or external focus involves different neural systems

Social Neuroscience
Suzanne OosterwijkMartin P Paulus

Abstract

According to embodied cognition theories, concepts are contextually situated and grounded in neural systems that produce experiential states. This view predicts that processing mental state concepts recruits neural regions associated with different aspects of experience depending on the context in which people understand a concept. This neuroimaging study tested this prediction using a set of sentences that described emotional (e.g., fear, joy) and nonemotional (e.g., thinking, hunger) mental states with internal focus (i.e., focusing on bodily sensations and introspection) or external focus (i.e., focusing on expression and action). Consistent with our predictions, data suggested that the inferior frontal gyrus, a region associated with action representation, was engaged more by external than internal sentences. By contrast, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with the generation of internal states, was engaged more by internal emotion sentences than external sentence categories. Similar patterns emerged when we examined the relationship between neural activity and independent ratings of sentence focus. Furthermore, ratings of emotion were associated with activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, whereas ...Continue Reading

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Citations

May 6, 2017·Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience·Suzanne OosterwijkH Steven Scholte
Nov 1, 2016·Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience·Lisa Feldman Barrett
Feb 13, 2018·Frontiers in Psychology·Piotr Winkielman, Yekaterina Gogolushko
Jun 20, 2018·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Piotr WinkielmanPaula Niedenthal
Apr 8, 2017·Frontiers in Psychology·Jenny C BaumeisterPiotr Winkielman

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
SMA

Software Mentioned

3dvolreg
Eprime
3dDespike
Psychology
3dDeconvolve
AlphaSim
Analysis of Functional Neuroimages ( AFNI )
3dAllineate

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