Scientists from the Higher School for Economics and Aarhus University have demonstrated that spatial navigation is linked to language comprehension.
The latter is a complicated cognitive function, and is performed by a network of cortical generators in the brain; physical experience, like movement or spatial motion play, play a key-part in psychological experiences as well as cognitive functions, which is related to how one mentally constructs the meaning of a sentence. The team carried out an experiment at the HSE Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, explaining the relation between those two systems by using neurophysiological data and describing the brain mechanisms supporting navigation systems in both domains.
In storytelling, individuals need to be able to jump to another person’s POV; the study is the first attempt to show that the brain simulates sentence perspective by using non-linguistic areas, which are typically in charge of video-spatial thinking. Earlier studies already pointed out that humans have certain spatial preferences, based either on the individual’s body (egocentric) or independent from it (allocentric); although this is not absolute and changes in various situations, those preferences define how one perceives the surrounding space, as well as how they plan and understand navigation in there.
For the experiment, the participants had to solve two types of tasks; the first was a computer-based spatial navigate task, which involved movement through a twisting virtual tunnel, at which’s end they had to indicate the beginning of it. The shape was designed so that participants with egocentric and allocentric perspectives would estimate this starting point differently, which helped the researchers to split them up according to their reference frame predisposition. The second task involved understanding simple sentences and match them with pictures.Those were different in terms of their perspective, and the same narrative could be described using first or second person pronouns. The participants had to choose pictures matched the situation described best by the sentence.
During both tasks, they wore EEG-helmets; spectral perturbation registered by those demonstrated a lot of areas responsible for navigation are also active during the completion of the tasks. Furthermore, the activation of areas when the participants heard the sentences depended on their spatial preferences. The correlation between both functions, which are highly dependent on the participant’s egocentric or allocentric perspective, both prove that this two phenomena are connected, as well as that the process of language comprehension activated brain-navigation systems.