Brain Activity During Antisaccades to Faces in Adolescence

International audienceCognitive control and social perception both change during adolescence, but little is known of the interaction of these 2 processes. We aimed to characterize developmental changes in brain activity related to the influence of a social stimulus on cognitive control and more specifically on inhibitory control. Children (age 8–11, n = 19), adolescents (age 12–17, n = 20), and adults (age 24–40, n = 19) performed an antisaccade task with either faces or cars as visual stimuli, during functional magnetic resonance brain imaging. We replicate the finding of the engagement of the core oculomotor and face perception brain regions in all age-groups, with increased involvement of frontoparietal oculomotor regions and fusiform face regions with age. The antisaccade-related activity was modulated by stimulus category significantly only in adolescents. This interaction was observed mainly in occipitotemporal regions as well as in supplementary motor cortex and postcentral gyrus. These results indicate a special treatment of social stimuli during adolescence

Semantic and syntactic predictions in reading aloud and visuo-motor statistical learning: an fMRI study in dyslexic students

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Preserved Contextual Cueing in Realistic Scenes in Patients with Age-Related Macular Degeneration

International audienceFoveal vision loss has been shown to reduce efficient visual search guidance due to contextual cueing by incidentally learned contexts. However, previous studies used artificial (T- among L-shape) search paradigms that prevent the memorization of a target in a semantically meaningful scene. Here, we investigated contextual cueing in real-life scenes that allow explicit memory of target locations in semantically rich scenes. In contrast to the contextual cueing deficits in artificial scenes, contextual cueing in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) did not differ from age-matched normal-sighted controls. We discuss this in the context of visuospatial working-memory demands for which both eye movement control in the presence of central vision loss and memory-guided search may compete. Memory-guided search in semantically rich scenes may depend less on visuospatial working memory than search in abstract displays, potentially explaining intact contextual cueing in the former but not the latter. In a practical sense, our findings may indicate that patients with AMD are less deficient than expected after previous lab experiments. This shows the usefulness of realistic stimuli in experimental clinical research

Semantic and syntactic prediction in reading and statistical learning: an fMRI study in dyslexia

International audienceThe predictive brain has become a key concept in language research and a dominant theoretical framework for understanding how the brain works. Psycholinguistic and neuroimaging research highlights the importance of anticipatory mechanisms in language comprehension, language production, and reading. In addition, a growing number of studies have used statistical learning (SL) paradigms to investigate whether SL abilities can explain inter-individual differences in language processing and reading abilities. The aims of the study were to, first, focus specifically on the neural network underlying semantic and syntactic predictive processing in reading and second, to understand whether making semantic and syntactic predictions in reading relies on domain-general SL abilities AND whether people with reading impairments (dyslexia) show deficits in these domains

Preserved Contextual Cueing in Realistic Scenes in Patients with Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Foveal vision loss has been shown to reduce efficient visual search guidance due to contextual cueing by incidentally learned contexts. However, previous studies used artificial (T- among L-shape) search paradigms that prevent the memorization of a target in a semantically meaningful scene. Here, we investigated contextual cueing in real-life scenes that allow explicit memory of target locations in semantically rich scenes. In contrast to the contextual cueing deficits in artificial scenes, contextual cueing in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) did not differ from age-matched normal-sighted controls. We discuss this in the context of visuospatial working-memory demands for which both eye movement control in the presence of central vision loss and memory-guided search may compete. Memory-guided search in semantically rich scenes may depend less on visuospatial working memory than search in abstract displays, potentially explaining intact contextual cueing in the former but not the latter. In a practical sense, our findings may indicate that patients with AMD are less deficient than expected after previous lab experiments. This shows the usefulness of realistic stimuli in experimental clinical research

Action Observation Network activity related to object-directed and socially-directed actions in Adolescents

The Action Observation Network (AON) encompasses brain areas consistently engaged when we observe other’s actions. Although the core nodes of the AON are present from childhood, it is not known to what extent they are sensitive to different action features during development. As social cognitive abilities continue to mature during adolescence, the AON response to socially-oriented actions, but not to object-related actions, may differ in adolescents and adults. To test this hypothesis, we scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 28 typically-developing teenagers and 25 adults while they passively watched videos of hand actions varying along two dimensions: sociality (i.e. directed towards another person or not) and transitivity (i.e. involving an object or not). We found that observing actions recruited the same fronto-parietal and occipito-temporal regions in adults and adolescents. The modulation of voxelwise activity by the social or transitive nature of the action was similar in both groups of participants. Multivariate pattern analysis, however, revealed that the accuracy in decoding the social dimension from the brain activity patterns, increased with age in lateral occipital and parietal regions, known to be involved in semantic representations of actions, as well as in posterior superior temporal sulcus, a region commonly associated with perception of high level features necessary for social perception. Change in decoding the transitive dimension was observed only in the latter region. These findings indicate that the representation of others’ actions, and in particular their social dimensions, in the adolescent AON is still not as robust as in adults

Semantic and syntactic prediction in reading and statistical learning: an fMRI study in dyslexia

International audienceThe predictive brain has become a key concept in language research and a dominant theoretical framework for understanding how the brain works. Psycholinguistic and neuroimaging research highlights the importance of anticipatory mechanisms in language comprehension, language production, and reading. In addition, a growing number of studies have used statistical learning (SL) paradigms to investigate whether SL abilities can explain inter-individual differences in language processing and reading abilities. The aims of the study were to, first, focus specifically on the neural network underlying semantic and syntactic predictive processing in reading and second, to understand whether making semantic and syntactic predictions in reading relies on domain-general SL abilities AND whether people with reading impairments (dyslexia) show deficits in these domains

Action Observation Network Activity Related to Object-Directed and Socially-Directed Actions in Adolescents

International audienceThe human action observation network (AON) encompasses brain areas consistently engaged when we observe other's actions. Although the core nodes of the AON are present from childhood, it is not known to what extent they are sensitive to different action features during development. Because social cognitive abilities continue to mature during adolescence, the AON response to socially-oriented actions, but not to object-related actions, may differ in adolescents and adults. To test this hypothesis, we scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) male and female typically-developing teenagers ( n = 28; 13 females) and adults ( n = 25; 14 females) while they passively watched videos of manual actions varying along two dimensions: sociality (i.e., directed toward another person or not) and transitivity (i.e., involving an object or not). We found that action observation recruited the same fronto-parietal and occipito-temporal regions in adults and adolescents. The modulation of voxel-wise activity according to the social or transitive nature of the action was similar in both groups of participants. Multivariate pattern analysis, however, revealed that decoding accuracies in intraparietal sulcus (IPS)/superior parietal lobe (SPL) for both sociality and transitivity were lower for adolescents compared with adults. In addition, in the lateral occipital temporal cortex (LOTC), generalization of decoding across the orthogonal dimension was lower for sociality only in adolescents. These findings indicate that the representation of the content of others' actions, and in particular their social dimension, in the adolescent AON is still not as robust as in adults. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The activity of the action observation network (AON) in the human brain is modulated according to the purpose of the observed action, in particular the extent to which it involves interaction with an object or with another person. How this conceptual representation of actions is implemented during development is largely unknown. Here, using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, we discovered that, while the action observation network is in place in adolescence, the fine-grain organization of its posterior regions is less robust than in adults to decode the abstract social dimensions of an action. This finding highlights the late maturation of social processing in the human brain