讲座主题：Representations of Linguistic Communicative Goals in Premotor Cortex
主 讲 人：周晓林 教授（华东师范大学）
讲座地点：外国语学院403会议室
讲座时间：2023年5月29日(周一） 15:00—17:00
腾讯会议：670-664-139
内容简介：
Linguistic communication is often regarded as an action conveying the speaker’s communicative goal to the addressee, such as making a promise or a request. Here, with both correlational (fMRI and EEG experiments) and causal (lesion and tACS experiments) evidence, we demonstrated that communicative goals are represented in human premotor cortex. In the experiments, participants read scripts each describing a daily-life scenario which involved two interlocutors. Each script contained a critical sentence said by the speaker with a goal of either a Promise, a Request, or a reply to a query that was included as the control for the Promise (Reply-1) or the Request (Reply-2). The fMRI results showed that the premotor cortex represented more information, as decoded by multivariate pattern classifications (MVPCs), on communicative goals than the traditional perisylvian language regions, and that the activity in the premotor cortex was more reliably predicted by the interlocutors’ attitudes related to the goals. Moreover, beta oscillations in the medial frontal areas can decode different commutative goals but beta oscillations in the occipitotemporal areas could not. The lesion experiment showed that, relative to healthy controls, the understanding of communicative goals was impaired in patients with lesions in the premotor cortex, whereas no reliable differences were observed between the healthy controls and the control group with lesions in other brain regions. Moreover, relative to alpha (10 Hz) and sham stimulation, beta (20 Hz) tACS stimulation to the medial frontal areas could enhance the understanding of commutative goals in speech. These findings convergently suggest that the premotor cortex is crucial for representing goals conveyed by communications, providing neural evidence for the theoretical view that linguistic communication can be seen as a goal-directed action.
主讲人简介：
周晓林，华东师范大学心理与认知科学学院院长，上海外国语大学语言研究院院长，教育部高等学校心理学教学指导委员会主任委员、特聘教授；曾为北京大学心理学系主任(2008-2013)、国务院学位委员会心理学评议组成员(2009-2020年)、国家自然科学基金委重大研究计划专家组成员(2010-2017年)、中国心理学会理事长(2017-2020年)。周晓林教授主要研究领域为语言认知、注意选择与执行控制、决策与神经经济学、社会认知与实验社会心理学。担任《心理科学》主编、Frontiers in Psychology杂志“语言科学”板块主编，主持科技部“973”、国家自然科学基金、英国经济与社会研究基金等30余项科研项目。2001年获得中共中央组织部、人事部和中国科协主持的中国青年科技奖”，2004年获得教育部高等学校”自然科学奖”一等奖，2015年获得教育部高等学校科学研究优秀成果奖(人文社会科学)二等奖，2015 -2022年连续多年入选Elsevier中国高被引学者榜单。
