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The Synergistic Role of Basal Ganglia in Semantic Comprehension and Tool Knowledge Processing: Evidence from brain damaged patients
Poster D35 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Di liu1, Zhiyun Dai1, Chongjing Luo1, Mingyang Li1,2, Luping Song3, Zaizhu Han1; 1Beijing Normal University, 2Zhejiang University, 3Huazhong University of Science and Technology Union Shenzhen Hospital(Nanshan Hospital)
The emergence of language and tools is a significant milestone in human evolution. In a recent study (Thibault et al., 2021) found that there are shared neural patterns in the basal ganglia during tool use and language processing. The present study aims to comprehensively investigate the collaborative patterns of different subregions within the basal ganglia in language comprehension and tool knowledge processing. Additionally, we also explore the similarities between these two cognitive processes for the connections of these subregions with other brain regions. A total of 99 patients with brain injuries and 51 healthy controls were recruited in this study. Neuroimaging data, including T1 and FLAIR T2, and diffusion tensor images (DTI), were collected. Brain lesion images were manually delineated. All participants completed classic language tasks, including the word version of Pyramids and Palm Trees Test (word PPT), picture version of PPT (picture PPT), oral picture naming, and word reading. Moreover, they performed a series of tool knowledge processing tasks that assessed four object attributes: form, function, manipulation, and motion. To control for the influence of demographic variables, the accuracy of each patient's performance in each task was transformed into standardized t-scores as behavioral measures (Han et al., 2013). The lesion degree of gray matter regions was measured as the percentage of lesion volume within regions of interest (ROIs), including six subregions of the basal ganglia (left and right caudate nucleus, putamen, and pallidum). The integrity degree of white matter tracts was calculated using the fractional anisotropy (FA) value of the tracts between two brain areas. In order to determine the differential impact of the same brain region or connection on different behavior performances, the method proposed by Matchin et al. (2022) was employed to evaluate the significance of differences in the slope of the gray matter lesion degree (or white matter integrity)-behavior regression curves, indicating the interaction effects. The interaction analysis of gray matter lesions observed significant interactions in the left caudate nucleus and the left pallidum in the comparisons between word PPT vs. reading, word PPT vs. picture PPT, and manipulation vs. motion tasks. In these interactions, the decline of performance with increasing lesion burden on the first task was significantly greater than that on the second task. Similar effects were observed for the left putamen in the comparisons between word PPT vs. reading, tool function vs. animal function, and tool function vs. tool motion. The interaction of white matter integrity showed widespread similarities across three contrasts: tool vs. animal in oral picture naming, word PPT vs. word reading, and manipulation vs. motion tasks. These similarities included connections between the basal ganglia with the frontal, insula and occipital area. The findings suggest that the left putamen is selectively involved in extracting knowledge related to tool function, while the left caudate nucleus and left pallidum are selectively involved in processing knowledge related to tool manipulation and semantic similarity of written words, respectively. Semantic comprehension and tool knowledge processing share a similar connectivity pattern in the left basal ganglia. This implies that the left basal ganglia may contribute to both semantic understanding and tool knowledge representation. The synergistic interaction of the left basal ganglia in these two cognitive processes provides new neurobiological evidence for the co-emergence of tools and language in human evolutionary history.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Acquired, Meaning: Lexical Semantics