Different neural systems for the recognition of animals and man-made tools

Perani, Daniela; Cappa, Stefano F.; Bettinardi, Valentino; Bressi, S.; Gorno‐Tempini, Maria Luisa; Matarrese, Mario; Fazio, Ferruccio

doi:10.1097/00001756-199508000-00012

Cited by 265 publications

(173 citation statements)

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“…Furthermore, less attention and affective processing may be devoted to low affording/low attractive tools because of their poor appeal, as indicated by the reduction on both P300 and LPP amplitudes. Remarkably, all the neural activity lasting until 750 ms was mainly left-sided distributed in agreement with previous research reporting that the manipulable object processing had a prevalence in left-sided generators (Cardellicchio et al, 2011;Chao et al, 1999;Chao and Martin, 2000;Martin et al, 1996;Perani et al, 1995;Pulvermüller et al, 1999;Vingerhoets, 2008;Vingerhoets et al, 2013). As to the predominance of the neural activity in the left regions, our subjects were all right-handed and hence the motor schemata activated by the observed tools evoked stronger right hand involvement, which is represented in the contralateral motor cortex (left).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…This further supports previous electrophysiological (Proverbio et al, 2011) and neuroimaging studies (Chao and Martin, 2000;Creem-Regehr and Lee, 2005;Grafton et al, 1997;Perani et al, 1995) showing that the functional and motor properties play a key role in tool recognition. The P200 may reflect the matching between the sensory inputs and the representations stored in memory (Amsel et al, in press;Luck and Hillyard, 1994;Phillips and Takeda, 2009;Frontopolar P250 in Schendan and Lucia, 2009) and may constitute the earliest evidence that sufficient information has been accessed to influence the decision outcome in object-decisiontasks (Amsel et al, in press).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

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Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: Insight from ERPs

Righi

Orlando

Marzi

2014

International Journal of Psychophysiology

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This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. The relation between attractiveness and motor affordance is a key topic in design and has not yet been investigated electrophysiologically. In this respect, action affordance and attractiveness represent two crucial dimensions in object processing (specifically for tools). In light of this evidence, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) enabled us to gain new insights into the time course of the interaction between these two dimensions during an explicit tool evaluation task. Behaviorally, tools that were judged as high affording and high attractive yielded faster response times than those judged as low affording and low attractive. The ERP results showed that early processes related to sensory gating and feature extraction (N100) were sensitive to both affordance and attractiveness; the P200 was dominated by affordance, indexing a facilitated access to motor action representation. The N300, P300 and the Late Positive Potential (LPP) showed enhanced responses for highly affording/attractive tools, reflecting the interconnection between attractiveness and affordance. Later responses were entirely affected by attractiveness, suggesting additional affective responses evoked by desirable tools. We are showing that things that are perceived as more functional and attractive have a privileged neural activation in the time course of tool evaluation, for the first time.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: Insight from ERPs

Righi

Orlando

Marzi

2014

International Journal of Psychophysiology

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“…In both tasks, natural objects provoked greater positivity (that is, smaller N400) in parietal areas, whereas artifacts provoked more positive ERPs in frontal areas. This scalp distribution is consistent with that observed in previous works, including ERP studies (Kiefer, 2001), reports of patients with brain lesions (e.g., Warrington and McCarthy, 1983;Warrington and Shallice, 1984), and studies using neuroimaging techniques (e.g., Perani et al, 1995;Martin et al, 1996;Grafton et al, 1997;Moore and Price, 1999). Therefore, all available evidence strongly suggests that the natural and artifactual domains have different neuroanatomical substrates.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…In addition, topographical differences between natural and artifactual domains have also been found with neuroimaging techniques. Although there is not complete agreement among all studies, likely due to the variety of tasks and stimuli used by the different investigators, in general, the results indicate that stimuli belonging to the natural class activate predominantly posterior areas of the left hemisphere, whereas those within the artifactual domain activate primarily the anterior areas of the left hemisphere (e.g., Dehaene, 1995;Perani et al, 1995;Martin et al, 1996;Grafton et al, 1997;Moore and Price, 1999). Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain the dissociation observed between the natural and the artifactual domain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Electrophysiological evidence for a natural/artifactual dissociation

2006

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The aim of this work was to test whether the differences usually found between the processing of visual stimuli corresponding to natural and artifactual domains reflect the different ways in which these domains are organized in the brain or are rather due to varying tasks demands. For this purpose, we designed two tasks in which subjects had to classify a series of line drawings. In one task (semantic categorization), the subjects were asked to categorize the stimuli as corresponding either to the natural or the artifactual class, and in the other (gender decision), the subjects had to decide if the names of the stimuli corresponded to either the masculine or the feminine gender. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and reactions times (RTs) were registered during the two tasks. We found both quantitative and topographical differences between ERPs elicited by natural stimuli and those by artifactual stimuli. In the 50-to 200-ms period, ERPs were more positive for the natural stimuli in the categorization task, but more positive for the artifactual stimuli in the gender decision task. In addition, natural stimuli elicited larger P600 and were associated with shorter RTs than artifactual stimuli in the categorization task. These results likely reflect differences concerning the relative difficulty of processing the stimuli of each domain in each task. In the N400 range, in contrast, there were differences between the two domains which were independent of task. In the two tasks, natural and artifactual stimuli elicited IntroductionThe organization of knowledge and its representation in the brain have been the subject of considerable interest in recent years. It is widely accepted that knowledge is grouped into semantic categories, and the division between the natural and artifactual (or living and nonliving) domains is one of the most obvious and traditionally studied distinctions. There is evidence suggesting that this distinction is not only cognitive but also has a neurological basis. Data from studies of braindamaged patients suggest that the two domains are processed, at least partially, in different areas of the brain. For example, patients with lesions in the left frontal area present more problems with images of inanimate objects, whereas B R A I N R E S E A R C H 1 0 6 7 ( 2 0 0 6 ) 1 8 9 -2 0 0 ⁎ Corresponding author.

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“…Adult imagery studies suggest that certain kinds are segregated in their cortical representation. Dedicated cerebral tissue exists to process properties of at least three broad classes of objects: members of our species, animals, and other things (e.g., Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997;Kanwisher, Stanley, & Harris, 1999;Kanwisher, Tong, & Nakayama, 1998;Martin, Wiggs, Ungerleider, & Haxby, 1996;Perani et al, 1995).…”

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confidence: 99%