Bulbar watershed ischemic stroke: the comma-shaped sign-a case series.

Watershed infarcts can involve the brainstem, with lesions distributed across the terminal supply from the vertebral and cerebellar arteries. Brain imaging can highlight a comma-shaped lesion at the edge of vertebral and posteroinferior cerebellar artery vascularization territory. Such peculiar MRI lesion shape might suggest a watershed hypoperfusion etiology and direct workup towards causes of hemodynamic impairment, including postural hypotension, cardiac failure, or vertebral artery origin occlusion.

The Multilevel Modality-Switch Effect: What Happens When We See the Bees Buzzing and Hear the Diamonds Glistening.

Previous studies demonstrated that the sequential verification of different sensory modality properties for concepts (e.g., BLENDER-loud; BANANA-yellow) brings about a processing cost, known as the modality-switch effect. We report an experiment designed to assess the influence of the mode of presentation (i.e., visual, aural) of stimuli on the modality-switch effect in a property verification and lexical decision priming paradigm. Participants were required to perform a property verification or a lexical decision task on a target sentence (e.g., "a BEE buzzes", "a DIAMOND glistens") presented either visually or aurally after having been presented with a prime sentence (e.g., "the LIGHT is flickering", "the SOUND is echoing") that could either share both, one or none of the target's mode of presentation and content modality. Results show that the mode of presentation of stimuli affects the conceptual modality-switch effect. Furthermore, the depth of processing required by the task modulates the complex interplay of perceptual and semantic information. We conclude that the MSE is a task-related, multilevel effect which can occur on two different levels of information processing (i.e., perceptual and semantic).

Naming a Lego world. The role of language in the acquisition of abstract concepts.

While embodied approaches of cognition have proved to be successful in explaining concrete concepts and words, they have more difficulties in accounting for abstract concepts and words, and several proposals have been put forward. This work aims to test the Words As Tools proposal, according to which both abstract and concrete concepts are grounded in perception, action and emotional systems, but linguistic information is more important for abstract than for concrete concept representation, due to the different ways they are acquired: while for the acquisition of the latter linguistic information might play a role, for the acquisition of the former it is instead crucial. We investigated the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts and words, and verified its impact on conceptual representation. In Experiment 1, participants explored and categorized novel concrete and abstract entities, and were taught a novel label for each category. Later they performed a categorical recognition task and an image-word matching task to verify a) whether and how the introduction of language changed the previously formed categories, b) whether language had a major weight for abstract than for concrete words representation, and c) whether this difference had consequences on bodily responses. The results confirm that, even though both concrete and abstract concepts are grounded, language facilitates the acquisition of the latter and plays a major role in their representation, resulting in faster responses with the mouth, typically associated with language production. Experiment 2 was a rating test aiming to verify whether the findings of Experiment 1 were simply due to heterogeneity, i.e. to the fact that the members of abstract categories were more heterogeneous than those of concrete categories. The results confirmed the effectiveness of our operationalization, showing that abstract concepts are more associated with the mouth and concrete ones with the hand, independently from heterogeneity.

Abstract and concrete sentences, embodiment, and languages.

One of the main challenges of embodied theories is accounting for meanings of abstract words. The most common explanation is that abstract words, like concrete ones, are grounded in perception and action systems. According to other explanations, abstract words, differently from concrete ones, would activate situations and introspection; alternatively, they would be represented through metaphoric mapping. However, evidence provided so far pertains to specific domains. To be able to account for abstract words in their variety we argue it is necessary to take into account not only the fact that language is grounded in the sensorimotor system, but also that language represents a linguistic-social experience. To study abstractness as a continuum we combined a concrete (C) verb with both a concrete and an abstract (A) noun; and an abstract verb with the same nouns previously used (grasp vs. describe a flower vs. a concept). To disambiguate between the semantic meaning and the grammatical class of the words, we focused on two syntactically different languages: German and Italian. Compatible combinations (CC, AA) were processed faster than mixed ones (CA, AC). This is in line with the idea that abstract and concrete words are processed preferentially in parallel systems - abstract in the language system and concrete more in the motor system, thus costs of processing within one system are the lowest. This parallel processing takes place most probably within different anatomically predefined routes. With mixed combinations, when the concrete word preceded the abstract one (CA), participants were faster, regardless of the grammatical class and the spoken language. This is probably due to the peculiar mode of acquisition of abstract words, as they are acquired more linguistically than perceptually. Results confirm embodied theories which assign a crucial role to both perception-action and linguistic experience for abstract words.