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Individual differences in brain network organization during taboo word perception
Poster A20 in Poster Session A - Sandbox Series, Thursday, October 24, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 4
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Annette Glotfelty1, Jeremy I. Skipper2, Steven L. Small1; 1The University of Texas at Dallas, 2University College London
Individual differences in brain activity, in response to the same or similar stimuli, represent a way to explore reliability and generalizability of research findings in many areas of brain and behavior, including the neurobiology of language. Individual data also provide the means to link idiosyncratic brain responses to trait-level phenotypes, a feature increasingly exploited to enable personalized medicine and education. Taboo words (i.e., ‘expletives,’ ‘curse words,’ ‘swear words,’ ‘obscenities,’ ‘profanity,’ etc.) are a unique subset of words, both biologically – they have distinctive presentations in neurological disorders – and behaviorally, by virtue of their relationship to human cognition, psychology, and social interactions. Researchers interested in taboo words have argued that swear word processing is particularly affected by individual differences such as personality or past experience (e.g., the severity of sanctions imposed from use of these words). Despite this interest, the role of individual differences in behavior has not been substantiated through brain imaging experiments. Evidence from neuroimaging studies of individual differences in affective neuroscience has shown that highly emotional stimuli result in more synchronized brain activity across participants, and behavioral studies of taboo words suggest that expletives are imbued with their tabooness due to their strong emotionality. This leads to the questions of the current study: (1) Does taboo word perception produce subject-level variability in processing? And (2) Is functional brain network organization mediated by trait-level differences? To answer these questions, we plan to use a subset of our publicly available Naturalistic Neuroimaging Database (NNDb), which includes BOLD MRI imaging of individuals watching full length movies as well as cognitive, emotional, and social tests of these participants from the NIH Toolbox (n = 56, 27F/29M, aged 18 – 55, each watching 1 of 7 films). Our study will compare functional brain activity for perception of curse words to that of generic content words during movie watching, and investigate which trait-level factors are most strongly correlated with individual differences in brain activity. We expect to find more individual differences for perception of swear words than for generic words, and that trait-level differences in social cognition will be more strongly correlated with our results, than differences in cognitive or psychological domains. Further, we expect that the most significant individual differences will be driven by regions associated with the putative default mode network (e.g., precuneus, angular gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex), which have been consistently implicated in social processing, particularly thinking about others’ motivations and emotions.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,