Reflective Self-Awareness and Conscious States: PET Evidence for a Common Midline Parietofrontal Core

Kjær, Troels W.; Nowak, Manfred; Lou, Hans C.

doi:10.1006/nimg.2002.1230

Cited by 336 publications

(209 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Here, medial posterior occipital activations are prominent. Interestingly, similar lingual gyrus activations have been seen in cases in which subjects were required to make inferences about other human participants, including their personality traits (Kjaer et al, 2002) and motives governing unfair monetary offers from a human partner (Sanfey et al, 2003). These data suggest that medial visual areas are engaged when people speculate about attributes or actions of others.…”

Section: Temporalmentioning

confidence: 54%

Neural correlates of human action observation in hearing and deaf subjects

et al. 2007

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Accumulating evidence has suggested the existence of a human action recognition system involving inferior frontal, parietal, and superior temporal regions that may participate in both the perception and execution of actions. However, little is known about the specificity of this system in response to different forms of human action. Here we present data from PET neuroimaging studies from passive viewing of three distinct action types, intransitive self-oriented actions (e.g., stretching, rubbing one's eyes, etc.), transitive object-oriented actions (e.g., opening a door, lifting a cup to the lips to drink), and the abstract, symbolic actions-signs used in American Sign Language. Our results show that these different classes of human actions engage a frontal/parietal/STS human action recognition system in a highly similar fashion. However, the results indicate that this neural consistency across motion classes is true primarily for hearing subjects. Data from deaf signers shows a non-uniform response to different classes of human actions. As expected, deaf signers engaged left-hemisphere perisylvian language areas during the perception of signed language signs. Surprisingly, these subjects did not engage the expected frontal/parietal/STS circuitry during passive viewing of nonlinguistic actions, but rather reliably activated middle-occipital temporal-ventral regions which are known to participate in the detection of human bodies, faces, and movements. Comparisons with data from hearing subjects establish statistically significant contributions of middle-occipital temporal-ventral during the processing of non-linguistic actions in deaf signers. These results suggest that during human motion processing, deaf individuals may engage specialized neural systems that allow for rapid, online differentiation of meaningful linguistic actions from non-linguistic human movements.

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Section: Temporalmentioning

confidence: 54%

Neural correlates of human action observation in hearing and deaf subjects

et al. 2007

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“…Generally speaking though, light sleep was associated with decreased activity in the frontal and parietal areas of the cortex and in the thalamus. Deep sleep is characterized by a further decrease in activity in these areas, as well as within the basal ganglia (e.g., Balkin et al, 2002;Braun et al, 1997Braun et al, , 1998Finelli, Baumann, Borbély, & Achermann, 2000;Kjaer, Nowak, & Lou, 2002;Maquet, 2000;Nofzinger, Mintun, Wiseman, Kupfer, & Moore, 1997;Nofzinger et al, 2002;Peigneux et al, 2001). As for stage 1 sleep, Czisch and his colleagues reported fMRI indications of reduced activation in both the auditory and visual cortex in response to auditory stimuli, as demonstrated by a decrease in the blood-oxygenation (Czisch et al, 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What subjective experiences determine the perception of falling asleep during sleep onset period?

Yang

Han

Yang

et al. 2010

Consciousness and Cognition

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a b s t r a c tSleep onset is associated with marked changes in behavioral, physiological, and subjective phenomena. In daily life though subjective experience is the main criterion in terms of which we identify it. But very few studies have focused on these experiences. This study seeks to identify the subjective variables that reflect sleep onset. Twenty young subjects took an afternoon nap in the laboratory while polysomnographic recordings were made. They were awakened four times in order to assess subjective experiences that correlate with the (1) appearance of slow eye movement, (2) initiation of stage 1 sleep, (3) initiation of stage 2 sleep, and (4) 5 min after the start of stage 2 sleep. A logistic regression identified control over and logic of thought as the two variables that predict the perception of having fallen asleep. For sleep perception, these two variables accurately classified 91.7% of the cases; for the waking state, 84.1%.

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“…The authors concluded that "self-referential processing is functionally dissociable from other forms of semantic processing within the human brain" (Kelley et al, 2002, p. 785). Kjaer, Nowak, and Lou (2002) took a similar approach, asking subjects to reflect on their own personality and physical traits for short periods, as well as on the personality and physical traits of the Danish queen. They found increased neural activation in medial parietal cortex and in left orbitofrontal cortex when subjects reflected on their own personality traits, and in anterior cingulate cortex during reflection on their own physical traits, relative to the corresponding traits of the queen.…”

Section: Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given the known association between the medial and orbital regions of the PFC and both person knowledge (J. P. Mitchell et al, 2002) and affective processing (Davidson & Irwin, 1999), it is possible that the activation of these areas is a function of amount and type of knowledge rather than self versus other knowledge per se. Although the experiments of Kelley et al (2002) and Kjaer et al (2002) included control conditions involving people, in both cases the control person was a public figure about whom the subjects would have had less knowledge, as well as less affective response. Of course, it may not be possible to equate the self and other conditions of any task for all of the potentially confounding factors.…”

Section: Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Self Special? A Critical Review of Evidence From Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Gillihan¹,

Farah²

2005

Psychological Bulletin

386

300

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Varied research findings have been taken to support the claim that humans' representation of the self is "special," that is, that it emerges from systems that are physically and functionally distinct from those used for more general purpose cognitive processing. The authors evaluate this claim by reviewing the relevant literatures and addressing the criteria for considering a system special, the various operationalizations of self, and how the studies' findings relate to the conclusions drawn. The authors conclude that many of the claims for the special status of self-related processing are premature given the evidence and that the various self-related research programs do not seem to be illuminating a unitary, common system, despite individuals' subjective experience of a unified self.A basic goal of information-processing psychology is to characterize the computational architecture of the mind, that is, to delineate the components of the information-processing system and describe their functions. Within this common framework, theories differ according to how many distinct components are posited and how specialized their functions are. In the case of some kinds of human information processing, claims of extreme specialization have been made. Language, for example, is often said to be a product of systems that are physically and functionally distinct from those used for more general-purpose cognitive processing-in other words, language has been claimed to be special. Evidence for the claim that language is special includes its reliance on a network of perisylvian brain areas that are not needed for nonlinguistic sound recognition or vocalization and its species specificity. Face recognition is also considered special by many because it relies on parts of ventral visual cortex that are not needed for visual recognition of nonface objects and because face representation is more holistic than the representation of other objects.

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Reflective Self-Awareness and Conscious States: PET Evidence for a Common Midline Parietofrontal Core

Cited by 336 publications

References 28 publications

Neural correlates of human action observation in hearing and deaf subjects

Neural correlates of human action observation in hearing and deaf subjects

What subjective experiences determine the perception of falling asleep during sleep onset period?

Is Self Special? A Critical Review of Evidence From Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience.

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