The neural career of sensory-motor metaphors. J Cogn Neurosci 2011 Sep;23(9):2376-86
Date
12/04/2010Pubmed ID
21126156Pubmed Central ID
PMC3131459DOI
10.1162/jocn.2010.21596Scopus ID
2-s2.0-79960114831 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 203 CitationsAbstract
The role of sensory-motor systems in conceptual understanding has been controversial. It has been proposed that many abstract concepts are understood metaphorically through concrete sensory-motor domains such as actions. Using fMRI, we compared neural responses with literal action (Lit; The daughter grasped the flowers), metaphoric action (Met; The public grasped the idea), and abstract (Abs; The public understood the idea) sentences of varying familiarity. Both Lit and Met sentences activated the left anterior inferior parietal lobule, an area involved in action planning, with Met sentences also activating a homologous area in the right hemisphere, relative to Abs sentences. Both Met and Abs sentences activated the left superior temporal regions associated with abstract language. Importantly, activation in primary motor and biological motion perception regions was inversely correlated with Lit and Met familiarity. These results support the view that the understanding of metaphoric action retains a link to sensory-motor systems involved in action performance. However, the involvement of sensory-motor systems in metaphor understanding changes through a gradual abstraction process whereby relatively detailed simulations are used for understanding unfamiliar metaphors, and these simulations become less detailed and involve only secondary motor regions as familiarity increases. Consistent with these data, we propose that anterior inferior parietal lobule serves as an interface between sensory-motor and conceptual systems and plays an important role in both domains. The similarity of abstract and metaphoric sentences in the activation of left superior temporal regions suggests that action metaphor understanding is not completely based on sensory-motor simulations but relies also on abstract lexical-semantic codes.
Author List
Desai RH, Binder JR, Conant LL, Mano QR, Seidenberg MSAuthor
Jeffrey R. Binder MD Professor in the Neurology department at Medical College of WisconsinMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
AdolescentAdult
Brain Mapping
Cerebral Cortex
Concept Formation
Female
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Judgment
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Metaphor
Motor Activity
Neuropsychological Tests
Oxygen
Reaction Time
Reading
Statistics as Topic
Young Adult
