title: First-person and third-person verbs in visual motion-perception regions.
abstract: Verb-related activity is consistently found in the left posterior lateral cortex (PLTC), encompassing also regions that respond to visual-motion perception. Besides motion, those regions appear sensitive to distinctions among the entities beyond motion, including that between first- vs. third-person ("third-person bias"). In two experiments, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we studied whether the implied subject (first/third-person) and/or the semantic content (motor/non-motor) of verbs modulate the neural activity in the left PLTC-regions responsive during basic- and biological-motion perception. In those sites, we found higher activity for verbs than for nouns. This activity was modulated by the person (but not the semantic content) of the verbs, with stronger response to third- than first-person verbs. The third-person bias elicited by verbs supports a role of motion-processing regions in encoding information about the entity beyond (and independently from) motion, and sets in a new light the role of these regions in verb processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Williams James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, 02138 MA, United States; Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, Corso Bettini, 31, 38068 Rovereto, Italy. Electronic address: liuba.papeo@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Liuba
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Papeo
authors.affiliation: Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, Corso Bettini, 31, 38068 Rovereto, Italy; Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Corso Bettini, 84, 38068 Rovereto, Italy.
authors.forename: Angelika
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lingnau
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics
keywords: Animacy; Biological motion; First and third person; Verbs and nouns; Visual motion perception