This paper examines how gesturers and signers use their bodies to express concepts such as instrumentality and humanness. Comparing across eight sign languages (American, Japanese, German, Israeli, and Kenyan Sign Languages, Ha Noi Sign Language of Vietnam, Central Taurus Sign Language of Turkey, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language of Israel) and the gestures of American non-signers, we find recurring patterns for naming entities in three semantic categories (tools, animals, and fruits & vegetables). These recurring patterns are captured in a classification system that identifies iconic strategies based on how the body is used together with the hands. Across all groups, tools are named with manipulation forms, where the head and torso represent those of a human agent. Animals tend to be identified with personification forms, where the body serves as a map for a comparable non-human body. Fruits & vegetables tend to be identified with object forms, where the hands act independently from the rest of the body to represent static features of the referent. We argue that these iconic patterns are rooted in using the body for communication, and provide a basis for understanding how meaningful communication emerges quickly in gesture and persists in emergent and established sign languages
Self-focused attention (SFA) and other-focused attention (OFA) are central maintenance factors of social anxiety. Tomita et al., Cognitive Therapy and Research 44:511–525, 2020 investigated brain activities when manipulating SFA and OFA during speech tasks, after controlling for social anxiety, using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and eye-tracking. Compared with the control condition, the SFA condition demonstrated greater activity in the right frontopolar area (rFPA) and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In the OFA condition, relative to controls, activity was greater in the left superior temporal gyrus. We investigated whether the activity in these brain areas increased in healthy individuals in proportion to their social anxiety tendency without manipulating SFA and OFA. Thirty-nine participants performed speech tasks under a no attentional manipulation (no-instruction) condition and a control (looking at various places) condition. Brain activity was measured using NIRS (oxy-Hb responses), and eye movements were tracked. We found that higher social anxiety was associated with higher rFPA activity in the no-instruction condition compared to the control condition and that higher subjective SFA during the no-instruction condition with higher social anxiety was associated with increased rFPA between the no-instruction and control conditions. These results suggest that greater activity in the rFPA is a useful objective measure of SFA related to social anxiety during speech tasks.
While dichotic listening (DL) was originally intended to measure bottom-up selective attention, it has also become a tool for measuring top-down selective attention. This study investigated the brain regions related to top-down selective and divided attention DL tasks and a 2-back task using alphanumeric and Japanese numeric sounds. Thirty-six healthy participants underwent near-infrared spectroscopy scanning while performing a top-down selective attentional DL task, a top-down divided attentional DL task, and a 2-back task. Pearson's correlations were calculated to show relationships between oxy-Hb concentration in each brain region and the score of each cognitive task. Different brain regions were activated during the DL and 2-back tasks. Brain regions activated in the top-down selective attention DL task were the left inferior prefrontal gyrus and left pars opercularis. The left temporopolar area was activated in the top-down divided attention DL task, and the left frontopolar area and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex were activated in the 2-back task. As further evidence for the finding that each task measured different cognitive and brain area functions, neither the percentages of correct answers for the three tasks nor the response times for the selective attentional task and the divided attentional task were correlated to one another. Thus, the DL and 2-back tasks used in this study can assess multiple areas of cognitive, brain-related dysfunction to explore their relationship to different psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Extant research has demonstrated that people with social anxiety exhibit attentional bias grounded in their metacognitive strategies when they are faced with internal and external threat stimuli. Based on this finding, the current study developed the Metacognition about Focused Attention in Social Anxiety Questionnaire (MFAQ) and investigated its reliability and validity.
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