Manuel de Vega

Universidad de La Laguna | ULL · Instituto Universitario de Neurociencia

The planning and execution of manual actions can be influenced by concomitant processing of manual action verbs. However, this phenomenon manifests in varied ways throughout the literature, ranging from facilitation to interference effects. Suggestively, stimuli across studies vary randomly in two potentially relevant variables: verb motility and e...

Introduction Previous studies on embodied meaning suggest that simulations in the motor cortex play a crucial role in the processing of action sentences. However, there is little evidence that embodied meaning have functional impact beyond working memory. This study examines how the neuromodulation of the motor cortex (M1) could affect the processi...

Self- and vicarious experience of physical pain induces inhibition of the motor cortex (M1). Experience of social rejections recruits the same neural network as physical pain, however, whether social pain modulates M1 corticospinal excitability remains unclear. This study examines for the first time whether social exclusion words, rather than simul...

Introduction The present study investigated how new words with acquired connotations of disgust and sadness, both negatively valenced but distinctive emotions, modulate the brain dynamics in the context of emotional sentences. Methods Participants completed a learning session in which pseudowords were repeatedly paired with faces expressing disgus...

Recent research has provided evidence that negation processing recruits the neural network of response inhibition (de Vega et al., 2016). Furthermore, inhibition mechanisms also play a role in human memory. In two experiments, we aimed to assess how producing a negation in a verification task may impact long-term memory. Experiment 1 used the same...

The growing number of depressive people and the overload in primary care services make it necessary to identify depressive states with easily accessible biomarkers such as mobile electro-encephalography (EEG). Some studies have addressed this issue by collecting and analyzing EEG resting state in a search of appropriate features and classification...

It has been proposed that processing sentential negation recruits the neural network of inhibitory control ( de Vega et al., 2016 ; Beltrán et al., 2021 ). In addition, inhibition mechanisms also play a role in switching languages for bilinguals ( Kroll et al., 2015 ). Since both processes may share inhibitory resources, the current study explored...

In this study, participants listened to first-person statements that mentioned a character who was approaching a geographical location close to (Tenerife, Canary Islands) or distant from the participant (Madrid, Spanish peninsula), pronounced with either the participants' local or a distal regional accent. Participants more often judged approaching...

The present study investigated how acquired disgusting and sad connotations affect neural activity in word processing. Participants completed a learning session in which pseudowords were paired with faces showing disgusted, sad, and neutral expressions, followed by an event-related potential (ERP) recording session involving a lexical-semantic deci...

This study examines the neural dynamics underlying the prosodic (duration) and the semantic dimensions in Spanish sentence perception. Specifically, we investigated whether adult listeners are aware of changes in the duration of a pretonic syllable of words that were either semantically predictable or unpredictable from the preceding sentential con...

Background: Processing of linguistic negation has been associated to inhibitory brain mechanisms. However, no study has tapped this link via multimodal measures in patients with core inhibitory alterations, a critical approach to reveal direct neural correlates and potential disease markers. Methods: Here we examined oscillatory, neuroanatomical...

Neuromodulation can be defined as the alteration of brain activity by delivering physical stimuli to a specific neural region [...]

Persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have impaired mentalizing skills. In this study, a group of persons with ASD traits (high-AQ scores) initially received sham tDCS before completing a pre-test in two mentalizing tasks: false belief and self-other judgments. Over the next week, on four consecutive days, they received sessions of anodal ele...

Negation is known to have inhibitory consequences for the information under its scope. However, how it produces such effects remains poorly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that negation processing might be implemented at the neural level by the recruitment of inhibitory and cognitive control mechanisms. On this line, this manuscript offe...

Negation applied to action contexts reduces the activation of the motor system. According to the Reusing Inhibition for Negation (RIN) hypothesis, such “disembodiment” effect occurs because understanding negations engages the reuse of inhibitory control mechanisms. Here, we investigated whether the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) – a key area o...

The embodied approach to meaning posits that the comprehension of words, sentences and discourse (especially narrative) reuses the neural systems of perception, action and emotion. The most recent data of neuroscience support this idea. Particularly, neuroimaging and brain electrophysiology confirm that action-related language involves activations...

The embodiment theory of linguistic meaning posits that comprehension reuses the sensory-motor systems and their neural networks. The present study aims to verify the embodiment theory by investigating the spatiotemporal brain dynamics of processing disgust-related words in Mandarin. These words were chosen because disgust is a basic emotion (e.g.,...

This research aims to explore the processing of embodied meaning during the comprehension of Chinese transfer verbs which is different from the typical structure of transfer verbs in English and other Indo-European languages. An Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) paradigm was used, in which participants were asked to read sentences describi...

The embodied meaning approach posits that understanding action-related language recruits motor processes in the brain. However, the functional impact of these motor processes on cognition has been questioned. The present study aims to provide new electrophysiological (EEG) evidence concerning the role of motor processes in the comprehension and mem...

Language is a powerful vehicle for expressing emotions, although the process by which words acquire their emotional meaning remains poorly understood. This study investigates how words acquire emotional meanings using two types of associative contexts: faces and sentences. To this end, participants were exposed to pseudowords repeatedly paired eith...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.596080.].

The embodiment approach has shown that motor neural networks are involved in the processing of action verbs. There is developmental evidence that embodied effects on verb processing are already present in early years. Yet, the ontogenetic origin of this motor reuse in action verbs remains unknown. This longitudinal study investigates the co-occurre...

The embodied cognition approach to linguistic meaning posits that action language understanding is grounded in sensory-motor systems. However, evidence that the human motor cortex is necessary for action language memory is meager. To address this issue, in two groups of healthy individuals, we perturbed the left primary motor cortex (M1) by means o...

It has been proposed that understanding negated action sentences (You don’t cut the bread) uses the neural networks of action inhibition. The evidence comes from studies in which affirmative or negative action language immediately preceded a Go/NoGo task. It was found that negation selectively modulates inhibition-related signatures of NoGo trials,...

Non-invasive stimulation of the primary motor cortex (M1) modulates processing of decontextualized action words and sentences (i.e., verbal units denoting bodily motion). This suggests that language comprehension hinges on brain circuits mediating the bodily experiences evoked by verbal material. Yet, despite its relevance to constrain mechanistic...

There is abundant literature demonstrating that processing emotional stimuli modu- lates inhibitory control processes. However, the reverse effects, namely, how cogni- tive inhibition influences the processing of emotional stimuli, have been considerably neglected. This ERP study tries to fill this gap by studying the bidirectional interac- tions b...

The recently proposed Reusing Inhibition for Negation (RIN) hypothesis posits that the inhibitory control mechanism is reused to understand sentential negation. The RIN hypothesis has only been tested in alphabetic languages, and its novelty requires additional support from non-alphabetic languages, like logographic non-Indo-European languages. Thi...

The two-step process account of negation understanding posits an initial representation of the negated events, followed by a representation of the actual state of events. On the other hand, behavioral and neurophysiological studies provided evidence that linguistic negation suppresses or reduces the activation of the negated events, contributing to...

Embodiment theories argue that language comprehension involves activating specific sensory–motor systems in the brain. Previous research performed in English and other Indo-European languages suggests that, when compared to compatible sentences referring to the same actions performed sequentially (e.g. ‘After cleaning the wound he unrolled the band...

In this event-related potentials study we tested whether sensory-motor relations between concrete words are encoded by default or only under explicit ad hoc instructions. In Exp. 1, participants were explicitly asked to encode sensory-motor relations (e.g., "do the following objects fit in a pencil-cup?"), while other possible semantic relations re...

We explored whether negation markers recruit inhibitory mechanisms during keyboard-based action-verb typing. In each trial, participants read two sentences: the first featured a context (There is a contract) and the second ended with a relevant verb which had to be immediately typed. Crucially, the verb could describe manual actions, non-manual act...

The neural network underlying action observation – i.e., the action observation network – forms an anticipatory representation of observed actions. Although correlational studies suggest that the motor cortex (M1) might be involved in this anticipatory coding, it is unclear whether M1 is also causally essential for making accurate predictions about...

Exploring the causal role of the motor system in the comprehension of action language: a tDCS study • Understanding action language elicits motor process in the brain. However, evidence that the human primary motor cortex (M1) is causally essential to comprehension of manual action language is meager [1,2,3]. • To demonstrate the functional role of...

Adolescents’ neural substrates of emotional reactions to the consequences of risky decisions are poorly understood. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, 30 late adolescents and 30 young adults made risky and neutral decisions in social scenarios and received valenced outcomes. Negative outcomes in risky decisions eliciting regret, a...

This study aims to extend the embodied cognition approach to syntactic processing. The hypothesis is that the brain resources to plan and perform motor sequences are also involved in syntactic processing. To test this hypothesis, Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read sentences with embedded relative clauses, ju...

My commentary is based on three matters derived from Ignacio Pozo’s article. First, I present my defence of the cognitive research that Pozo criticizes and characterizes as methodologically aseptic and disembodied. Second, I discuss my doubts regarding the author’s arguments on external representations overcoming the limitations of embodied cogniti...

Unlabelled: According to the literature, negations such as "not" or "don't" reduce the accessibility in memory of the concepts under their scope. Moreover, negations applied to action contents (e.g., "don't write the letter") impede the activation of motor processes in the brain, inducing "disembodied" representations. These facts provide importan...

We report a study that examined the existence of a cognitive developmental paradox in the counterfactual evaluation of decision-making outcomes. According to this paradox adolescents and young adults could be able to apply counterfactual reasoning and, yet, their counterfactual evaluation of outcomes could be biased in a salient socio-emotional con...

This ERP study explores how the reader’s brain is sensitive to the protagonist’s perspective in the fictitious environment of narratives. Participants initially received narratives describing a protagonist living in a given geographical place. Later on they were given short paragraphs describing another character as “coming” or “going” to a place e...

Continuity and discontinuity are sometimes marked in discourse by means of connectives. This study tested for the first time whether causal and concessive connectives induce expectations of emotional continuity and discontinuity, respectively. Using a novel double-task paradigm, participants first listened to an antecedent clause with a causal or c...

This study explores the time-course of word processing by grammatical class (verbs vs. nouns) and meaning (action vs. non-action) by means of an ERP experiment. The morphology of Spanish words allows for a noun (e.g., bail-e [a dance]) or a verb (e.g., bail-ar [to dance]) to be formed by simply changing the suffix attached to the root. This facilit...

This study examined how well self-reported sensation seeking, empathy and resistance to peer influence, and performance on the computer-based measure to evaluate risk-taking behavior (Balloon Analogue Risk Task, BART) predicted the risk decision-making process on the computer-based Social Context Decision Task (SCDT). Participants were 256 early, m...

Cognitive and dual-processes models, involving cognitive and socio-emotional components, for adolescents’ risky behaviour have been proposed. This study tested their predictions by manipulating the presence or absence of feedback about gains and losses in health and peer popularity in a decision-making task with peers. Risky (e.g., taking or refusi...

Approach and avoidance tendencies towards valenced others could be associated with our interpersonal conduct towards them: helping would be associated with approach tendency, and harming (or denying help) would be associated with avoidance. We propose that the encoding of this association enjoys attentional priority, as approach/avoidance represent...

Expone los principales temas de la psicología del lenguaje, ahondando en los conceptos básicos de la disciplina, los niveles de comprensión oral y escrita, la producción oral del lenguaje y la lectura, así como los trastornos propios del lenguaje. http://www.medicapanamericana.com/Libros/Libro/5432/Psicologia-del-Lenguaje.html

In this chapter I propose that the embodied cognition approach provides a plausible psychological foundation for linguistic meaning, and could shed light on the study of inferences in comprehension. The chapter is organized as follows. First, I discuss how symbolist and embodied approaches to meaning differ. Second, I present the functional advanta...

Brain stimulation using transcranial alternating current (tACS) in specific frequencies is thought to interact with oscillatory brain activity (Miniussi et al, 2013). Corticospinal excitability , as measured by TMS-provoked motor evoked potentials (MEPs), is modulated by tACS in a frequency-dependent manner (Feurra et al, 2011) tACS modulations of...

This study examines by means of fMRI the neural mechanisms underlying risk decision-making in social contexts. Particularly interesting is to explore in naturalistic scenarios whether there is an imbalance between the maturation of control and reward brain circuitry during adolescence that becomes less pronounced in early adulthood years. Sixty par...

La frecuencia silábica posicional es una variable de reciente utilización en nuestro idioma. Por su carácter fonológico ha sido utilizada en este trabajo tanto para estudiar su papel en la lectura como para obtener algunas pistas sobre diferencias interlingüísticas entre nuestro idioma y otros que como el inglÉs son más opacos a la hora de traducir...

This study examines by means of fMRI the neural mechanisms underlying adolescents’ risk decision-making in social contexts. We hypothesize that the social context could engage brain regions associated with social cognition processes and developmental changes are also expected. Sixty participants (adolescents: 17-18, and young adults: 21-22 years ol...

Some studies have reported that understanding concrete action-related words and sentences elicits activations of motor areas in the brain. The present fMRI study goes one step further by testing whether this is also the case for comprehension of nonfactual statements. Three linguistic structures were used (factuals, counterfactuals, and negations),...

The mu rhythms (8-13Hz) and the beta rhythms (15 up to 30Hz) of the EEG are observed in the central electrodes (C3, Cz and C4) in resting states, and become suppressed when participants perform a manual action or when they observe another's action. This has led researchers to consider that these rhythms are electrophysiological markers of the motor...

This paper investigates how language comprehension is modulated by temporal information, marked by time adverbs, and bodily constraints imposed by motor actions. The experiment used a paradigm similar to that employed by de Vega, Robertson, Glenberg, Kaschak and Rinck (2004), but included significant refinements in the materials and the procedure,...

This study explores spatial representations generated by people playing either the producer’s or the comprehender’s role in non-interactive settings, under identical manipulations of the communication modality (pointing vs. verbal directions) and the type of body rotation (physical vs. imagined). Results showed that these manipulations consistently...

This study provides ERP and oscillatory dynamics data associated with the comprehension of narratives involving counterfactual events. Participants were given short stories describing an initial situation ("Marta wanted to plant flowers in her garden…."), followed by a critical sentence describing a new situation in either a factual ("Since she fou...

This paper explores the temporal course of discourse updating after reading counterfactual events. To test the accessibility to discourse information, readers were asked to identify probes related to initial events in the text, previous to the counterfactual, or probes related to the critical counterfactual events. Experiment 1 showed that 500 ms a...

Cognitive scientists have a variety of approaches to studying cognition: experimental psychology, computer science, robotics, neuroscience, educational psychology, philosophy of mind, and psycholinguistics, to name but a few. In addition, they also differ in their approaches to cognition - some of them consider that the mind works basically like a...

Recent evidence suggests that understanding factual action-related sentences involves embodied simulations. But, what happens with counterfactual sentences that describe hypothetical events in the past? This study demonstrates that even in this case embodied simulations of actions take place. Participants listened to factual or counterfactual sente...

This study used a dual-task paradigm to analyze the time course of motor resonance during the comprehension of action language. In the study, participants read sentences describing a transfer either away from ("I threw the tennis ball to my rival") or toward themselves ("My rival threw me the tennis ball"). When the transfer verb appeared on the sc...

This study investigates whether understanding up/down metaphors as well as semantically homologous literal sentences activates embodied representations online. Participants read orientational literal sentences (e.g., she climbed up the hill), metaphors (e.g., she climbed up in the company), and abstract sentences with similar meaning to the metapho...