时间的多维度空间表征:分离的起源与激活机制

近期研究发现时间可以分别在三个空间维度(左右、前后和上下)进行表征, 但不同维度心理时间线的起源和激活机制尚存争议。最新证据表明, 左右维度时间线主要起源于阅读/书写习惯所伴随的感觉运动经验, 其激活可能是一种低水平的感觉运动机制; 前后和上下维度时间线主要起源于语言中的空间隐喻, 其激活可能是一种高水平的语义机制。未来研究应更关注心理时间线的起源多样性、先天基础、神经机制以及时间线和数字线的类比。     

具身记忆及其内在机制

具身记忆研究主要探讨身体及其感觉运动过程在记忆中的作用。操纵或限制身体的物理状态、具身特征或可用性,可以影响记忆的效率、效价和内容。其内在机制可以通过编码特异性原理、启动效应、隐喻表征理论和再激活假说进行解释,但尚未形成统一的模型。基于现有研究与理论的共性,提出具身记忆的感觉运动模拟模型,强调重新激活在具身记忆中的作用,以期在同一框架下说明身体作用于记忆的过程,并进一步指出重新激活的条件。未来亟需在具身记忆的稳定性以及深层机制等方面进行多维度的基础和应用研究。     

情境模型的更新：事件框架依赖假设的进一步证据

采用多指标探测范式, 从客体信息以及活动信息的角度出发, 考察事件框架内外时间、空间转换对情境模型更新的影响。结果发现：在事件框架内, 维度转换并不是情境模型更新的充分条件, 时间转换与终止的活动信息相结合引起情境模型的快速更新, 而空间转换与移除的客体信息相结合引起情境模型的快速更新; 在事件框架外, 维度转换是情境模型更新的充分条件, 维度转换会引起情境模型的更新。研究丰富了事件框架依赖假设。     

发展性阅读障碍亚类型研究进展

发展性阅读障碍是一种特殊的学习障碍,伴有多种认知缺陷并且存在不同的亚类型。依据相关的阅读模型理论,阅读障碍可划分为语音型和表层型。从认知缺陷角度出发,语音加工缺陷是主要的缺陷表现,以此为特征形成一种主要的阅读障碍的亚类型,同时还有以正字法加工缺陷和快速命名缺陷为主的其他亚类型。而以基本感知觉缺陷为标准,主要有以视觉加工缺陷和以听觉加工缺陷为主的两种亚类型。在汉语条件下,依据同样的阅读模型理论,语音型阅读障碍亚类型比例明显低于拼音文字条件下的。汉语阅读障碍也具有分别以语音加工缺陷、快速命名缺陷和正字法加工缺陷为主要认知缺陷的亚类型。未来有必要从神经机制角度进一步明确不同亚类型的神经基础。     

空间转换在记叙文阅读情境模型建构中的作用

采用探测词和事件分割范式探讨了空间转换与事件转换分离的情况下, 空间转换在记叙文情境模型建构中的作用。实验1a重复前人研究, 探讨空间转换对阅读时间和情境模型更新的影响, 并验证在空间转换对情境模型的影响的研究中, 采用多指标探测范式的合理性。实验1b探讨在空间转换与事件转换相分离的条件下, 空间转换对情境模型更新的影响; 实验2a探讨空间转换对事件分割的影响, 并验证在空间转换对情境模型的影响的研究中, 采用事件分割范式的合理性; 实验2b探讨空间转换与事件转换相分离的条件下, 空间转换对事件分割的影响, 从而验证空间转换对情境模型更新的影响。结果表明, 当空间转换与事件转换相分离时, 不引起情境模型的更新, 事件单元是建构记叙文心理表征的核心单元, 空间转换只有在标识事件转换的情况下, 才能引发读者更新情境模型。     

强迫症患者的注意转换及在线元认知调节

为探索强迫症患者是否同时存在注意转换和在线元认知调节障碍,本研究使用线索性任务转换范式及数字跟踪击键范式并结合ERP数据,对16名强迫症患者的注意转换能力和在线元认知调节能力进行了评价。结果表明,强迫症患者同时存在注意转换及在线元认知调节的缺陷。     

对听感觉运动门控自上而下调节的动物模型和神经机制

对惊反射的前脉冲抑制是减少干扰影响、保护脑内信息加工的重要机制。它既是研究感觉运动门控的模型, 也是探究精神分裂症机制的模型。前脉冲抑制可被选择性注意和情绪等高级认知活动所调节。本论文工作围绕着恐惧条件化和知觉空间分离去掩蔽(空间选择性注意)对听觉前脉冲抑制多层次化的自上而下调节, 在大鼠行为模型、神经通路、神经电生理机制等几个层次上开展了系统性研究, 并引入了精神分裂症的神经发育模型, 证实早期社会隔离饲养对前脉冲抑制注意调节的破坏影响。本论文研究成果不仅对认识正常情况下脑在复杂刺激场景中的信息加工机制有重要意义, 以感觉运动门控认知调节功能缺失为基础的动物模型也将推动精神分裂症心理学和神经生物学机制的研究。     

记叙文阅读中主人公转换对情境模型更新的影响

应用探测任务范式和事件分割范式,以反应时、正确率、均字阅读时间等为指标,探讨主人公转换在记叙文情境模型更新中的作用。结果显示：（1）在主人公转换与事件转换一致时,主人公转换条件下的认知加工更加困难,表现为较长的反应时和均字阅读时间,以及较低的正确率和较高的分割概率。（2）在主人公转换与事件转换不一致条件下,主人公转换对反应时和均字阅读时间的影响显著降低,而分割概率与无转换条件无差异。这表明,事件是记叙文情境模型的核心;主人公维度仅在代表事件转换的条件下,才能引起情境模型的更新。     

自闭症谱系儿童模仿缺陷的脑神经机制

模仿在人类生命进化中具有举足轻莺的意义,自闭症儿童的认知发展的研究表明,模仿缺陷是导致自闭症谱系儿童沟通障碍、社交困难的核心缺陷.而镜像神经系统机能失常假设有力地解释了自闭症谱系儿童模仿缺陷的神经机制.尽管镜像神经系统的信息加工过程还存在着MOSAIC模型和EP-M模型的争论.但这两种模型都支持自闭症儿童脑神经功能连通异常的假说.     

发展性障碍儿童的脑发育特点及干预

随着发展认知神经科学的兴起, 研究者借助脑成像等技术探讨了发展性障碍儿童的脑结构发育特点, 发展缺陷与脑功能损伤的关系以及障碍干预和脑功能改善的机制等, 这为揭示发展性障碍儿童异常神经机制的共性和特异性, 进而为早期诊断和干预提供了重要的生物学标记。针对儿童期常见的发展性障碍, 从脑结构损伤、脑激活异常、脑网络连接和脑功能康复等方面对相关研究进行了总结, 指出未来研究应拓展角度, 注重揭示各发展性障碍之间异常脑发育特点的共性和特异性的具体表现、病理机制及基因基础等; 临床工作者应注重将脑发育的异常和功能改善用于辅助各类障碍的早期识别和干预效果评估。     

Auditory imagery and the poor-pitch singer

The vocal imitation of pitch by singing requires one to plan laryngeal movements on the basis of anticipated target pitch events. This process may rely on auditory imagery, which has been shown to activate motor planning areas. As such, we hypothesized that poor-pitch singing, although not typically associated with deficient pitch perception, may be associated with deficient auditory imagery. Participants vocally imitated simple pitch sequences by singing, discriminated pitch pairs on the basis of pitch height, and completed an auditory imagery self-report questionnaire (the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale). The percentage of trials participants sung in tune correlated significantly with self-reports of vividness for auditory imagery, although not with the ability to control auditory imagery. Pitch discrimination was not predicted by auditory imagery scores. The results thus support a link between auditory imagery and vocal imitation.     

A frog in your throat or in your ear? Searching for the causes of poor singing

Singing is a cultural universal and an important part of modern society, yet many people fail to sing in tune. Many possible causes have been posited to explain poor singing abilities; foremost among these are poor perceptual ability, poor motor control, and sensorimotor mapping errors. To help discriminate between these causes of poor singing, we conducted 5 experiments testing musicians and nonmusicians in pitch matching and judgment tasks. Experiment 1 introduces a new instrument called a slider, on which participants can match pitches without using their voice. Pitch matching on the slider can be directly compared with vocal pitch matching, and results showed that both musicians and nonmusicians were more accurate using the slider than their voices to match target pitches, arguing against a perceptual explanation of singing deficits. Experiment 2 added a self-matching condition and showed that nonmusicians were better at matching their own voice than a synthesized voice timbre, but were still not as accurate as on the slider. This suggests a timbral translation type of mapping error. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that singers do not improve over multiple sung responses, or with the aid of a visual representation of pitch. Experiment 5 showed that listeners were more accurate at perceiving the pitch of the synthesized tones than actual voice tones. The pattern of results across experiments demonstrates multiple possible causes of poor singing, and attributes most of the problem to poor motor control and timbral-translation errors, rather than a purely perceptual deficit, as other studies have suggested.     

Left-hemisphere activation is associated with enhanced vocal pitch error detection in musicians with absolute pitch

The ability to process auditory feedback for vocal pitch control is crucial during speaking and singing. Previous studies have suggested that musicians with absolute pitch (AP) develop specialized left-hemisphere mechanisms for pitch processing. The present study adopted an auditory feedback pitch perturbation paradigm combined with ERP recordings to test the hypothesis whether the neural mechanisms of the left-hemisphere enhance vocal pitch error detection and control in AP musicians compared with relative pitch (RP) musicians and non-musicians (NM). Results showed a stronger N1 response to pitch-shifted voice feedback in the right-hemisphere for both AP and RP musicians compared with the NM group. However, the left-hemisphere P2 component activation was greater in AP and RP musicians compared with NMs and also for the AP compared with RP musicians. The NM group was slower in generating compensatory vocal reactions to feedback pitch perturbation compared with musicians, and they failed to re-adjust their vocal pitch after the feedback perturbation was removed. These findings suggest that in the earlier stages of cortical neural processing, the right hemisphere is more active in musicians for detecting pitch changes in voice feedback. In the later stages, the left-hemisphere is more active during the processing of auditory feedback for vocal motor control and seems to involve specialized mechanisms that facilitate pitch processing in the AP compared with RP musicians. These findings indicate that the left hemisphere mechanisms of AP ability are associated with improved auditory feedback pitch processing during vocal pitch control in tasks such as speaking or singing.     

Effects of altered auditory feedback across effector systems: production of melodies by keyboard and singing

We report an experiment that tested whether effects of altered auditory feedback (AAF) during piano performance differ from its effects during singing. These effector systems differ with respect to the mapping between motor gestures and pitch content of auditory feedback. Whereas this action-effect mapping is highly reliable during phonation in any vocal motor task (singing or speaking), mapping between finger movements and pitch occurs only in limited situations, such as piano playing. Effects of AAF in both tasks replicated results previously found for keyboard performance (Pfordresher, 2003), in that asynchronous (delayed) feedback slowed timing whereas alterations to feedback pitch increased error rates, and the effect of asynchronous feedback was similar in magnitude across tasks. However, manipulations of feedback pitch had larger effects on singing than on keyboard production, suggesting effector-specific differences in sensitivity to action-effect mapping with respect to feedback content. These results support the view that disruption from AAF is based on abstract, effector independent, response-effect associations but that the strength of associations differs across effector systems.     

Force control under auditory feedback: effector differences and audiomotor memory

Audiomotor integration is a basic form of sensorimotor control for regulating vocal pitch and vocal loudness, but its contribution to general motor control has only been studied minimally. In this paper, auditory feedback for prolonged force control was investigated by comparing manual and oral force generation and testing short-term audiomotor memory for these effectors. Ten healthy volunteers between the ages of 20 and 30 years old were recruited. The participants produced continuous force for 30 sec. with the lip or finger to match auditory targets. In the feedback condition, when auditory feedback was provided for 30 sec., lip force was more variable than finger force. In the memory condition, the force output of both effectors remained stable for approximately 4 sec. after feedback removal, followed by significant decay. A longer short-term memory capacity could facilitate encoding of motor memories for tasks having acoustic goals. The results demonstrate that "audiomotor" integration was effective for sustaining forces, and that audiomotor force memory is comparable to reports of visuomotor force memory.     

ERP correlates of language-specific processing of auditory pitch feedback during self-vocalization

The present study investigated whether the neural correlates for auditory feedback control of vocal pitch can be shaped by tone language experience. Event-related potentials (P2/N1) were recorded from adult native speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese who heard their voice auditory feedback shifted in pitch by −50, −100, −200, or −500 cents when they sustained the vowel sound /u/. Cantonese speakers produced larger P2 amplitudes to −200 or −500 cents stimuli than Mandarin speakers, but this language effect failed to reach significance in the case of −50 or −100 cents. Moreover, Mandarin speakers produced shorter N1 latencies over the left hemisphere than the right hemisphere, whereas Cantonese speakers did not. These findings demonstrate that neural processing of auditory pitch feedback in vocal motor control is subject to language-dependent neural plasticity, suggesting that cortical mechanisms of auditory-vocal integration can be shaped by tone language experience.     

Vocal pitch discrimination in the motor system

Speech production can be broadly separated into two distinct components: Phonation and Articulation. These two aspects require the efficient control of several phono-articulatory effectors. Speech is indeed generated by the vibration of the vocal-folds in the larynx (F0) followed by 'filtering" by articulators, to select certain resonant frequencies out of that wave (F1, F2, F3, etc.). Recently it has been demonstrated that the motor representation of articulators (lips and tongue) participates in the discrimination of articulatory sounds (lips- and tongue-related speech sounds). Here we investigate whether the results obtained on articulatory sounds discrimination could be extended to phonation by applying a dual-pulse TMS protocol while subjects had to discriminate F0-shifted vocal utterances [a]. Stimulation over the larynx motor representation, compared to the control site (tongue/lips motor cortex), induced a reduction in RT for stimuli including a subtle pitch shift. We demonstrate that vocal pitch discrimination, in analogy with the articulatory component, requires the contribution of the motor system and that this effect is somatotopically organized.     

The mental representation of music notation: notational audiation

This study investigated the mental representation of music notation. Notational audiation is the ability to internally "hear" the music one is reading before physically hearing it performed on an instrument. In earlier studies, the authors claimed that this process engages music imagery contingent on subvocal silent singing. This study refines the previously developed embedded melody task and further explores the phonatory nature of notational audiation with throat-audio and larynx-electromyography measurement. Experiment 1 corroborates previous findings and confirms that notational audiation is a process engaging kinesthetic-like covert excitation of the vocal folds linked to phonatory resources. Experiment 2 explores whether covert rehearsal with the mind's voice also involves actual motor processing systems and suggests that the mental representation of music notation cues manual motor imagery. Experiment 3 verifies findings of both Experiments 1 and 2 with a sample of professional drummers. The study points to the profound reliance on phonatory and manual motor processing--a dual-route stratagem--used during music reading. Further implications concern the integration of auditory and motor imagery in the brain and cross-modal encoding of a unisensory input.     

Mouse vocal communication system: Are ultrasounds learned or innate?

Mouse ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are often used as behavioral readouts of internal states, to measure effects of social and pharmacological manipulations, and for behavioral phenotyping of mouse models for neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. However, little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms of rodent USV production. Here we discuss the available data to assess whether male mouse song behavior and the supporting brain circuits resemble those of known vocal non-learning or vocal learning species. Recent neurobiology studies have demonstrated that the mouse USV brain system includes motor cortex and striatal regions, and that the vocal motor cortex sends a direct sparse projection to the brainstem vocal motor nucleus ambiguous, a projection previously thought be unique to humans among mammals. Recent behavioral studies have reported opposing conclusions on mouse vocal plasticity, including vocal ontogeny changes in USVs over early development that might not be explained by innate maturation processes, evidence for and against a role for auditory feedback in developing and maintaining normal mouse USVs, and evidence for and against limited vocal imitation of song pitch. To reconcile these findings, we suggest that the trait of vocal learning may not be dichotomous but encompass a broad spectrum of behavioral and neural traits we call the continuum hypothesis, and that mice possess some of the traits associated with a capacity for limited vocal learning.     

Are Vocal Pitch Changes in Response to Facial Expressions of Emotions Potential Cues of Empathy? A Preliminary Report

Previous research has demonstrated that even brief exposures to facial expressions of emotions elicit facial mimicry in receivers in the form of corresponding facial muscle movements. As well, vocal and verbal patterns of speakers converge in conversations, a type of vocal mimicry. There is also evidence of cross-modal mimicry in which emotional vocalizations elicit corresponding facial muscle activity. Further, empathic capacity has been associated with enhanced tendency towards facial mimicry as well as verbal synchrony. We investigated a type of potential cross-modal mimicry in a simulated dyadic situation. Specifically, we examined the influence of facial expressions of happy, sad, and neutral emotions on the vocal pitch of receivers, and its potential association with empathy. Results indicated that whereas both mean pitch and variability of pitch varied somewhat in the predicted directions, empathy was correlated with the difference in the variability of pitch while speaking to the sad and neutral faces. Discussion of results considers the dimensional nature of emotional vocalizations and possible future directions.