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. 2022 Mar 24:13:802756.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.802756. eCollection 2022.

Different Neural Information Flows Affected by Activity Patterns for Action and Verb Generation

Zijian Wang  1 , Zuo Zhang  2 , Yaoru Sun  3
Affiliations

Different Neural Information Flows Affected by Activity Patterns for Action and Verb Generation

Zijian Wang et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Shared brain regions have been found for processing action and language, including the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the premotor cortex (PMC), and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL). However, in the context of action and language generation that shares the same action semantics, it is unclear whether the activity patterns within the overlapping brain regions would be the same. The changes in effective connectivity affected by these activity patterns are also unclear. In this fMRI study, participants were asked to perform hand action and verb generation tasks toward object pictures. We identified shared and specific brain regions for the two tasks in the left PMC, IFG, and IPL. The mean activation level and multi-voxel pattern analysis revealed that the activity patterns in the shared sub-regions were distinct for the two tasks. The dynamic causal modeling results demonstrated that the information flows for the two tasks were different across the shared sub-regions. These results provided the first neuroimaging evidence that the action and verb generation were task context driven in the shared regions, and the distinct patterns of neural information flow across the PMC-IFG-IPL neural network were affected by the polymodal processing in the shared regions.

Keywords: action; dynamic causal modeling; functional MRI; multi-voxel pattern analysis; verb.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The functional MRI (fMRI) experiment paradigm design. There were two scan runs in this experiment. One run comprises three tasks: NAM, to silently name an object picture; GenA, to perform a hand gesture to an object picture; GenV, to silently generate a verb to an object picture. Before the task block, a visual cue was presented to prompt the task.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The basic dynamic causal modeling (DCM) model for the DCM across premotor cortex (PMC), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and inferior parietal lobule (IPL). The basic DCM model was specified with intrinsic bidirectional connections between all regions of interest (ROIs) and driving input into all Shared sub-regions in the left PMC, IFG, and IPL.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Activation maps for (A) GenA>NAM, (B) GenV>NAM, and (C) GenA>GenV. Color bars represent T values.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Shared and specific sub-regions in the left premotor cortex (PMC; A), the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG; B), and the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL; C). (A) The GenA-PMC was located in the dorsal PMCd and the SMA. The GenV-PMC and Shared-PMC were located in the PMCd. (B) The GenA-IFG and Shared-IFG were located in Brodmann Area (BA) 44 and 45. The GenV-IFG was located in BA45. (C) GenA-IPL, GenV-IPL, and Shared IPL ROIs were all located in the left Supramarginal gyrus (BA40).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Comparisons between the GenA and GenV tasks in the shared regions. (A) Estimated parameters for GenA-NAM and GenV-NAM conditions. (B) The classification accuracy in each shared region and the V1.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Results of dynamic causal modeling (DCM) analysis across premotor cortex (PMC), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and inferior parietal lobule (IPL). (A) The best-fit DCM model with GenA modulatory effect. (B) The best-fit DCM model with GenV modulatory effect. The numbers on the solid arrows indicate the average modulatory effects. The numbers in red indicate that the modulatory effects survive Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.
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