Different Neural Mechanisms For Causal Processing In Language and Perception: An fMRI Study

Authors

Brett B. Bankson, University of Portland
Dirk B. den Ouden, Chapman UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2015

Abstract

Information that is used to establish and evaluate causal relationships between objects and events can be gleaned from many sources, especially those that rely on language and perception. For example, sentences with a verb structure using change of state verbs such as “to break” or “to freeze” imply sequential events that express understood causal relationships. At this time, little research has examined the neural correlates of causal verb processing or has compared them to the more well researched brain activity involved in perceptual causal processing. This study investigated the extent to which the evaluation of causal verbs and causal image pairs recruits brain areas distinct from non-causal verbs and non-causal image pairs. The authors administered a lexical task and a separate perceptual task involving causal judgments to 6 participants in an MRI scanner. Data analysis yielded no activation differences for the linguistic task conditions, suggesting that there was no difference in causal processing between the change of state and non-change of state verbs used in the current study. In the perceptual task, the activation peaks that were found for the causal image pairs in the inferior parietal lobule and supramarginal gyrus, rather than the expected frontal areas, suggest that perceptual causality is evaluated based on modality-specific qualities such as spatial change and implied motion. The depiction of sequential events and before-after states in the causal image stimuli provide a new context for perceptual processing in parietal and temporal cortices. Further analysis and additional research that utilizes a more explicit linguistic task will focus on the role language plays in encoding causality based on perceptual information so as to further clarify neural recruitment during causal processing.

Comments

This article was originally published in Undergraduate Research Journal of Psychology at UCLA, volume 2, issue 1, in 2015. https://doi.org/10.5070/JP2.33575

Recommended Citation

Bankson, B. B., & Den Ouden, D.B (2015). Different neural mechanisms for causal processing in language and perception: An fmri study. Undergraduate Research Journal of Psychology at UCLA, 2(1), 14-21. https://doi.org/10.5070/JP2.33575

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

The authors

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License