Using a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, both experiments of the present study investigated the link between the mental representations of iconic gestures and words. Two groups of the participants performed a primed lexical decision task where they had to discriminate between visually presented words and nonwords (e.g., flirp). Word targets (e.g., bird) were preceded by video clips depicting either semantically related (e.g., pair of hands flapping) or semantically unrelated (e.g., drawing a square with both hands) gestures. The duration of gestures (...) was on average 3,500 ms in Experiment 1 but only 1,000 ms in Experiment 2. Significant priming effects were observed in both experiments, with faster response latencies for related gesture–word pairs than unrelated pairs. These results are consistent with the idea of interactions between the gestural and lexical representational systems, such that mere exposure to iconic gestures facilitates the recognition of semantically related words. (shrink)

Schizophrenia is considered as a self-disorder with disordered local synchronous activation. Previous studies have reported widespread dyssynchrony of local activation in patients with SZ, which may be one of the crucial physiological mechanisms of SZ. To further verify this assumption, this work used a surface-based two-dimensional regional homogeneity approach to compare the local neural synchronous spontaneous oscillation between patients with SZ and healthy controls, instead of the volume-based regional homogeneity approach described in previous study. Ninety-seven SZ patients and 126 HC (...) were recruited to this study, and we found the SZ showed abnormal 2dReHo across the cortical surface. Specifically, at the global level, the SZ patients showed significantly reduced global 2dReHo; at the vertex level, the foci with increased 2dReHo in SZ were located in the default mode network, frontoparietal network, and limbic network ; however, foci with decreased 2dReHo were located in the somatomotor network, auditory network, and visual network. Additionally, this work found positive correlations between the 2dReHo of bilateral rectus and illness duration, as well as a significant positive correlation between the 2dReHo of right orbital inferior frontal gyrus with the negative scores of the positive and negative syndrome scale in the SZ patients. Therefore, the 2dReHo could provide some effective features contributed to explore the pathophysiology mechanism of SZ. (shrink)

Wearing a myoelectric prosthesis is a basic way for limb amputees to restore their lost limb functions in the activities of daily living. However, it is estimated that around 40% of amputees refuse the prosthesis. One of the primary reasons would be that the current prostheses lack appropriate sensory feedback. Currently, the amputees only depend on their visual feedback when using their arm prostheses. It would be difficult for them to accurately control the wrist position, which is vital for flexible (...) manipulation in ADLs. This manuscript designed a myoelectric arm prosthesis with wrist position feedback. To study the effect level of position feedback on prosthetic control, two tests were performed. The vibrotactile perception range test aims to analyze the perception sensitivity of the vibration in humans and obtain the optimal perception range utilized in the sensory feedback test. The sensory feedback test analyzes the effectiveness of the position feedback by comparing three feedback methods of Vis-FB, WP-FB, and a combination of Vis-FB and WP-FB. These tests were conducted by asking six able-bodied subjects to perform 20 movement combinations of five target positions. The WP-FB was transiently activated with five vibrating motors embedded in an armband to stimulate the arm stump when the prosthetic wrist rotates to the target positions. Our experimental results showed that when WP-FB was added to the prosthetic control, the absolute angular error of the prosthetic wrist declined from 4.50° to 1.08° while the success rate 3 increased from 0.34 to 0.84, respectively. This study demonstrates the importance of WP-FB to the effective control of the arm prosthesis. (shrink)