Right temporopolar activation associated with unique perception
Section snippets
Subjects
Normal, right-handed, native Japanese volunteers were recruited from the inter-college community by advertisement and were screened by a structured interview to exclude history of psychiatric or neurological illness. Sixty-eight subjects (41 females, age 20–36 years, each with more than 14 years of education) who were naïve to the stimuli participated in the imaging experiment. All gave informed consent in keeping with experimental procedures approved by the Institutional Review Board of the
Results
The mean number and standard deviations of the responses in the experimental subjects supplied for each of the three categories (unique, infrequent and frequent) were 11.6 ± 8.9, 12.0 ± 6.5, and 15.8 ± 5.1, respectively. The singular and diverse nature of the unique responses is indicated by the fact that each response type included in the “unique” category was produced only by 1.2 ± 0.5 of experimental subjects on average (± SD), whereas each response type included in the “frequent” category was
Discussion
The present event-related fMRI study revealed differential activity in the right temporopolar regions at the time of vocal onset of unique vs. frequent responses. This result was confirmed by the alternative parametric modulation analysis that was performed to eliminate potentially confounding perceptual effects of the stimuli.
In this experiment, in which subjects responded vocally in the scanner, activation related to vocal movements derived from the movements of the nasopharyngeal organs
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Drs. A. Ikeda, Y. Inaba and N. Sato for technical assistance and useful advice. This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research (19002010) to Y. M. and a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research C (17500203) to S. K. from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, and a Grant from the Takeda Foundation and Nakayama Foundation for Science, Technology and Culture to Y. M.
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