No support for a causal role of primary motor cortex in construing meaning from language: An rTMS study

Embodied cognition theories predict a functional involvement of sensorimotor processes in language understanding. In a preregistered experiment, we tested this idea by investigating whether interfering with primary motor cortex (M1) activation can change how people construe meaning from action langu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neuropsychologia 2024-04, Vol.196, p.108832, Article 108832
Main Authors: Solana, Pablo, Escámez, Omar, Casasanto, Daniel, Chica, Ana B., Santiago, Julio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognition
Construal level
Embodied cognition
Humans
Language
Language comprehension
Motor cortex
Motor Cortex - physiology
rTMS
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation - methods
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Summary:Embodied cognition theories predict a functional involvement of sensorimotor processes in language understanding. In a preregistered experiment, we tested this idea by investigating whether interfering with primary motor cortex (M1) activation can change how people construe meaning from action language. Participants were presented with sentences describing actions (e.g., "turning off the light”) and asked to choose between two interpretations of their meaning, one more concrete (e.g., "flipping a switch") and another more abstract (e.g., "going to sleep"). Prior to this task, participants’ M1 was disrupted using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). The results yielded strong evidence against the idea that M1-rTMS affects meaning construction (BF01 > 30). Additional analyses and control experiments suggest that the absence of effect cannot be accounted for by failure to inhibit M1, lack of construct validity of the task, or lack of power to detect a small effect. In sum, these results do not support a causal role for primary motor cortex in building meaning from action language. [Display omitted] •We investigated whether M1 inhibition changes the meaning of action language.•rTMS over M1 did not significantly alter meaning construction from action sentences.•Potential confounds (e.g., lack of task validity) cannot account for by the null effect.•Present results challenge a causal role of M1 in action language comprehension.
ISSN:0028-3932
1873-3514
1873-3514
DOI:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2024.108832