Poster C26, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 10:45 am – 12:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Neural correlate of social comunication
Diola Elizabeth Valles Capetillo1, Magdalena Giordano1;1Departamento de Neurobiología Conductual y Cognitiva, Instituto de Neurobiología UNAM Campus Juriquilla, Querétaro, México
Social communication is fundamental for successful social interactions and involves the use of pragmatic language. The most difficult pragmatic form to communicate is verbal irony (Angeleri et al., 2008). Verbal irony is a statement that transmits the opposite meaning to its literal counterpart (Grice, 1975); it is relevant, but it is inappropriate, and the intention of the speaker is that the listener recognizes her true intention (Attardo, 2000). The statement can be interpreted as ironical, literal, or as a white lie (Pexman, 2008); if the listener does not detect the relation of the statement to the context, the statement can be interpreted as absurd. The brain areas that have been associated with verbal irony comprehension are the dmPFC and rmPFC (BA 9), IFG (BA 44), and STG (BA 22; Reyes-Aguilar, et al., 2018), these results are based on 12 studies, many of them in Japanese. The purpose of the present study was to expand these results and evaluate the neural and cognitive correlates of ironic comprehension in a Spanish speaking sample. We created 14 contexts per condition (i.e. ironic, deceitful, literal and absurd), and 14 statements that could be associated with all conditions. The linguistic proprieties were evaluated by 120 young adults (mean age = 22.91). Then, 30 young adults (15 M and 15 F, age mean = 22.73) classified the intention of the statements according to the context. To control for individual differences in reading speed, the stimuli were recorded. For an initial fMRI study, the task was presented using the text and the auditory modalities. We selected 8 participants (4 M), half of them performed the task in the text modality. A 3 Tesla GE MR750 scanner with a 32-channel head coil was used, BOLD signal was examined during the statement. Preprocessing was performed with the fmripre pipeline (Esteban, et al., 2018). The data analysis for first, second and third level was performed using FSL 5.0.9 (Jenkinson, et al., 2012 ). We computed the mean for each condition and contrasts between conditions. The analysis was corrected at the cluster level at p > 0.05 to predict the BOLD signal. For the text modality, the mean activation for irony and deceit was found in the left supramarginal gyrus with extension to the postcentral gyrus. For the audio modality, both irony and deceit were associated with bilateral activation in Heschl’s gyrus, planum temporale, and posterior superior temporal gyrus. The same results were found when calculating a joint analysis, text plus audio. Differences by contrasts were not found. In conclusion, the contexts and statements had the desired qualities and that they were well understood by the participants. The initial fMRI pilot study showed that irony and deceit, in both modalities, recruited areas involved in semantic integration of social contexts. We did not find differences between these two conditions, likely due to the small sample used. A larger sample would allow us to determine if there are differences in the areas involved in the comprehension of irony versus deceit.
Themes: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Methods
Method: Functional Imaging