Mikko Sams - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Mikko Sams
Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, Jun 1, 2023
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Apr 17, 2019
We are constantly categorizing other people as belonging to our in-group ('one of us') or out-gro... more We are constantly categorizing other people as belonging to our in-group ('one of us') or out-group ('one of them'). Such grouping occurs fast and automatically and can be based on others' visible characteristics such as skin color or clothing style. Here we studied neural underpinnings of implicit social grouping not often visible on the face, male sexual orientation. A total of 14 homosexuals and 15 heterosexual males were scanned in functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching a movie about a homosexual man, whose face was also presented subliminally before (subjects did not know about the character's sexual orientation) and after the movie. We discovered significantly stronger activation to the man's face after seeing the movie in homosexual but not heterosexual subjects in medial prefrontal cortex, frontal pole, anterior cingulate cortex, right temporal parietal junction and bilateral superior frontal gyrus. In previous research, these brain areas have been connected to social perception, self-referential thinking, empathy, theory of mind and in-group perception. In line with previous studies showing biased perception of in-/out-group faces to be context dependent, our novel approach further demonstrates how complex contextual knowledge gained under naturalistic viewing can bias implicit social perception.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Apr 16, 2018
NeuroImage, Apr 1, 2016
Efficient speech perception requires the mapping of highly variable acoustic signals to distinct ... more Efficient speech perception requires the mapping of highly variable acoustic signals to distinct phonetic categories. How the brain overcomes this many-to-one mapping problem has remained unresolved. To infer the cortical location, latency, and dependency on attention of categorical speech sound representations in the human brain, we measured stimulus-specific adaptation of neuromagnetic responses to sounds from a phonetic continuum. The participants attended to the sounds while performing a non-phonetic listening task and, in a separate recording condition, ignored the sounds while watching a silent film. Neural adaptation indicative of phoneme category selectivity was found only during the attentive condition in the pars opercularis (POp) of the left inferior frontal gyrus, where the degree of selectivity correlated with the ability of the participants to categorize the phonetic stimuli. Importantly, these category-specific representations were activated at an early latency of 115-140 ms, which is compatible with the speed of perceptual phonetic categorization. Further, concurrent functional connectivity was observed between POp and posterior auditory cortical areas. These novel findings suggest that when humans attend to speech, the left POp mediates phonetic categorization through integration of auditory and motor information via the dorsal auditory stream.
Recent studies have yielded contradictory evidence on whether visual speech perception (watching ... more Recent studies have yielded contradictory evidence on whether visual speech perception (watching articulatory gestures) can activate the human primary auditory cortex. To circumvent confounds due to inter-individual anatomical variation, we defined our subjects' Heschl's gyri and assessed blood oxygenation-dependent signal changes at 3 T within this confined region during visual speech perception and observation of moving circles. Visual speech perception activated Heschl's gyri in nine subjects, with activation in seven of them extending to the area of primary auditory cortex. Activation was significantly stronger during visual speech perception than during observation of the moving circles. Further, a significant hemisphere by stimulus interaction occurred, suggesting left Heschl's gyrus specialization for visual speech processing.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Nov 11, 2010
One of the most fundamental questions in speech perception research is how properties of the acou... more One of the most fundamental questions in speech perception research is how properties of the acoustic speech signal are mapped to linguistic elements such as phonemes. Distinct theories have been proposed to answer this question. A crucial distinction among these theories can be put in the form of a simple question: does the speech motor system have a role in speech perception? From this view, recent studies postulate that the anterior auditory cortex "what" processing pathway would be involved in acoustic-phonetic decoding while posterior auditory cortex "where/how" stream would underlie a sensorimotor mapping between auditory representations and articulatory motor representations. In return, this motor-related activity is hypothesized to constrain phonetic interpretation of the sensory inputs through the internal generation of candidate articulatory categorizations. Consistent with such perceptual-motor interactions in speech perception, we hypothesized that the "where/how" processing pathway would be more engaged when perceiving speech stimuli before producing them compared to passively listening to the same stimuli. Using magnetoencephalography we tested whether equivalent current dipole (ECD) source location estimate (which approximates the center of gravity of neural activity) of the so-called M100 response recorded about 100 ms from the auditory speech stimulus onset would shift posteriorly when subjects are perceiving phonemes and subsequently perform a speech production task, compared to a pure passive perception task. Ten healthy volunteers were presented the same syllables with two levels of ambiguity (presented with or without auditory noise) in four different conditions: passive perception, passive perception and overt repetition, passive perception and covert repetition, and passive perception and overt imitation. In the three last 'motor' conditions, the task of the subjects was to perceive the phoneme first, then wait for visual signal, and perform the speech production task. Compared to the passive speech perception condition, results showed a significant shift of the ECD-estimated location of M100 response to the phoneme sounds to a more posterior position in the left hemisphere during the motor tasks. This demonstrates that perceiving speech before speaking induces a stronger involvement of the "where/how" processing pathway and therefore suggests that sensorimotor interactions during speech perception are dependent on the exact content of the task.
Brain and behavior, Dec 29, 2022
Brain Sciences
Perception of the same narrative can vary between individuals depending on a listener’s previous ... more Perception of the same narrative can vary between individuals depending on a listener’s previous experiences. We studied whether and how cultural family background may shape the processing of an audiobook in the human brain. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 48 healthy volunteers from two different cultural family backgrounds listened to an audiobook depicting the intercultural social life of young adults with the respective cultural backgrounds. Shared cultural family background increased inter-subject correlation of hemodynamic activity in the left-hemispheric Heschl’s gyrus, insula, superior temporal gyrus, lingual gyrus and middle temporal gyrus, in the right-hemispheric lateral occipital and posterior cingulate cortices as well as in the bilateral middle temporal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus and precuneus. Thus, cultural family background is reflected in multiple areas of speech processing in the brain and may also modulate visual imagery. After neuroimaging...
Design Science, 2020
Empathic design highlights the relevance of understanding users and their circumstances in order ... more Empathic design highlights the relevance of understanding users and their circumstances in order to obtain good design outcomes. However, theory-based quantitative methods, which can be used to test user understanding, are hard to find in the design science literature. Here, we introduce a validated method used in social psychological research – the empathic accuracy method – into design to explore how well two designers perform in a design task and whether the designers’ empathic accuracy performance and the physiological synchrony between the two designers and a group of users can predict the designers’ success in two design tasks. The designers could correctly identify approximately 50% of the users’ reported mental content. We did not find a significant correlation between the designers’ empathic accuracy and their (1) performance in design tasks and (2) physiological synchrony with users. Nevertheless, the empathic accuracy method is promising in its attempts to quantify the ef...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2020
Putting oneself into the shoes of others is an important aspect of social cognition. We measured ... more Putting oneself into the shoes of others is an important aspect of social cognition. We measured brain hemodynamic activity and eye-gaze patterns while participants were viewing a shortened version of the movie ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ from two perspectives: that of a potential organ donor, who violates moral norms by refusing to donate her kidney, and that of a potential organ recipient, who suffers in pain. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) of brain activity was significantly higher during the potential organ donor’s perspective in dorsolateral and inferior prefrontal, lateral and inferior occipital, and inferior–anterior temporal areas. In the reverse contrast, stronger ISC was observed in superior temporal, posterior frontal and anterior parietal areas. Eye-gaze analysis showed higher proportion of fixations on the potential organ recipient during both perspectives. Taken together, these results suggest that during social perspective-taking different brain areas can be flexibly recrui...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2018
PloS one, 2017
Seeing an action may activate the corresponding action motor code in the observer. It remains unr... more Seeing an action may activate the corresponding action motor code in the observer. It remains unresolved whether seeing and performing an action activates similar action-specific motor codes in the observer and the actor. We used novel hyperclassification approach to reveal shared brain activation signatures of action execution and observation in interacting human subjects. In the first experiment, two "actors" performed four types of hand actions while their haemodynamic brain activations were measured with 3-T functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The actions were videotaped and shown to 15 "observers" during a second fMRI experiment. Eleven observers saw the videos of one actor, and the remaining four observers saw the videos of the other actor. In a control fMRI experiment, one of the actors performed actions with closed eyes, and five new observers viewed these actions. Bayesian canonical correlation analysis was applied to functionally realign obser...
Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, Jun 1, 2023
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Apr 17, 2019
We are constantly categorizing other people as belonging to our in-group ('one of us') or out-gro... more We are constantly categorizing other people as belonging to our in-group ('one of us') or out-group ('one of them'). Such grouping occurs fast and automatically and can be based on others' visible characteristics such as skin color or clothing style. Here we studied neural underpinnings of implicit social grouping not often visible on the face, male sexual orientation. A total of 14 homosexuals and 15 heterosexual males were scanned in functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching a movie about a homosexual man, whose face was also presented subliminally before (subjects did not know about the character's sexual orientation) and after the movie. We discovered significantly stronger activation to the man's face after seeing the movie in homosexual but not heterosexual subjects in medial prefrontal cortex, frontal pole, anterior cingulate cortex, right temporal parietal junction and bilateral superior frontal gyrus. In previous research, these brain areas have been connected to social perception, self-referential thinking, empathy, theory of mind and in-group perception. In line with previous studies showing biased perception of in-/out-group faces to be context dependent, our novel approach further demonstrates how complex contextual knowledge gained under naturalistic viewing can bias implicit social perception.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Apr 16, 2018
NeuroImage, Apr 1, 2016
Efficient speech perception requires the mapping of highly variable acoustic signals to distinct ... more Efficient speech perception requires the mapping of highly variable acoustic signals to distinct phonetic categories. How the brain overcomes this many-to-one mapping problem has remained unresolved. To infer the cortical location, latency, and dependency on attention of categorical speech sound representations in the human brain, we measured stimulus-specific adaptation of neuromagnetic responses to sounds from a phonetic continuum. The participants attended to the sounds while performing a non-phonetic listening task and, in a separate recording condition, ignored the sounds while watching a silent film. Neural adaptation indicative of phoneme category selectivity was found only during the attentive condition in the pars opercularis (POp) of the left inferior frontal gyrus, where the degree of selectivity correlated with the ability of the participants to categorize the phonetic stimuli. Importantly, these category-specific representations were activated at an early latency of 115-140 ms, which is compatible with the speed of perceptual phonetic categorization. Further, concurrent functional connectivity was observed between POp and posterior auditory cortical areas. These novel findings suggest that when humans attend to speech, the left POp mediates phonetic categorization through integration of auditory and motor information via the dorsal auditory stream.
Recent studies have yielded contradictory evidence on whether visual speech perception (watching ... more Recent studies have yielded contradictory evidence on whether visual speech perception (watching articulatory gestures) can activate the human primary auditory cortex. To circumvent confounds due to inter-individual anatomical variation, we defined our subjects' Heschl's gyri and assessed blood oxygenation-dependent signal changes at 3 T within this confined region during visual speech perception and observation of moving circles. Visual speech perception activated Heschl's gyri in nine subjects, with activation in seven of them extending to the area of primary auditory cortex. Activation was significantly stronger during visual speech perception than during observation of the moving circles. Further, a significant hemisphere by stimulus interaction occurred, suggesting left Heschl's gyrus specialization for visual speech processing.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Nov 11, 2010
One of the most fundamental questions in speech perception research is how properties of the acou... more One of the most fundamental questions in speech perception research is how properties of the acoustic speech signal are mapped to linguistic elements such as phonemes. Distinct theories have been proposed to answer this question. A crucial distinction among these theories can be put in the form of a simple question: does the speech motor system have a role in speech perception? From this view, recent studies postulate that the anterior auditory cortex "what" processing pathway would be involved in acoustic-phonetic decoding while posterior auditory cortex "where/how" stream would underlie a sensorimotor mapping between auditory representations and articulatory motor representations. In return, this motor-related activity is hypothesized to constrain phonetic interpretation of the sensory inputs through the internal generation of candidate articulatory categorizations. Consistent with such perceptual-motor interactions in speech perception, we hypothesized that the "where/how" processing pathway would be more engaged when perceiving speech stimuli before producing them compared to passively listening to the same stimuli. Using magnetoencephalography we tested whether equivalent current dipole (ECD) source location estimate (which approximates the center of gravity of neural activity) of the so-called M100 response recorded about 100 ms from the auditory speech stimulus onset would shift posteriorly when subjects are perceiving phonemes and subsequently perform a speech production task, compared to a pure passive perception task. Ten healthy volunteers were presented the same syllables with two levels of ambiguity (presented with or without auditory noise) in four different conditions: passive perception, passive perception and overt repetition, passive perception and covert repetition, and passive perception and overt imitation. In the three last 'motor' conditions, the task of the subjects was to perceive the phoneme first, then wait for visual signal, and perform the speech production task. Compared to the passive speech perception condition, results showed a significant shift of the ECD-estimated location of M100 response to the phoneme sounds to a more posterior position in the left hemisphere during the motor tasks. This demonstrates that perceiving speech before speaking induces a stronger involvement of the "where/how" processing pathway and therefore suggests that sensorimotor interactions during speech perception are dependent on the exact content of the task.
Brain and behavior, Dec 29, 2022
Brain Sciences
Perception of the same narrative can vary between individuals depending on a listener’s previous ... more Perception of the same narrative can vary between individuals depending on a listener’s previous experiences. We studied whether and how cultural family background may shape the processing of an audiobook in the human brain. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 48 healthy volunteers from two different cultural family backgrounds listened to an audiobook depicting the intercultural social life of young adults with the respective cultural backgrounds. Shared cultural family background increased inter-subject correlation of hemodynamic activity in the left-hemispheric Heschl’s gyrus, insula, superior temporal gyrus, lingual gyrus and middle temporal gyrus, in the right-hemispheric lateral occipital and posterior cingulate cortices as well as in the bilateral middle temporal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus and precuneus. Thus, cultural family background is reflected in multiple areas of speech processing in the brain and may also modulate visual imagery. After neuroimaging...
Design Science, 2020
Empathic design highlights the relevance of understanding users and their circumstances in order ... more Empathic design highlights the relevance of understanding users and their circumstances in order to obtain good design outcomes. However, theory-based quantitative methods, which can be used to test user understanding, are hard to find in the design science literature. Here, we introduce a validated method used in social psychological research – the empathic accuracy method – into design to explore how well two designers perform in a design task and whether the designers’ empathic accuracy performance and the physiological synchrony between the two designers and a group of users can predict the designers’ success in two design tasks. The designers could correctly identify approximately 50% of the users’ reported mental content. We did not find a significant correlation between the designers’ empathic accuracy and their (1) performance in design tasks and (2) physiological synchrony with users. Nevertheless, the empathic accuracy method is promising in its attempts to quantify the ef...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2020
Putting oneself into the shoes of others is an important aspect of social cognition. We measured ... more Putting oneself into the shoes of others is an important aspect of social cognition. We measured brain hemodynamic activity and eye-gaze patterns while participants were viewing a shortened version of the movie ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ from two perspectives: that of a potential organ donor, who violates moral norms by refusing to donate her kidney, and that of a potential organ recipient, who suffers in pain. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) of brain activity was significantly higher during the potential organ donor’s perspective in dorsolateral and inferior prefrontal, lateral and inferior occipital, and inferior–anterior temporal areas. In the reverse contrast, stronger ISC was observed in superior temporal, posterior frontal and anterior parietal areas. Eye-gaze analysis showed higher proportion of fixations on the potential organ recipient during both perspectives. Taken together, these results suggest that during social perspective-taking different brain areas can be flexibly recrui...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2018
PloS one, 2017
Seeing an action may activate the corresponding action motor code in the observer. It remains unr... more Seeing an action may activate the corresponding action motor code in the observer. It remains unresolved whether seeing and performing an action activates similar action-specific motor codes in the observer and the actor. We used novel hyperclassification approach to reveal shared brain activation signatures of action execution and observation in interacting human subjects. In the first experiment, two "actors" performed four types of hand actions while their haemodynamic brain activations were measured with 3-T functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The actions were videotaped and shown to 15 "observers" during a second fMRI experiment. Eleven observers saw the videos of one actor, and the remaining four observers saw the videos of the other actor. In a control fMRI experiment, one of the actors performed actions with closed eyes, and five new observers viewed these actions. Bayesian canonical correlation analysis was applied to functionally realign obser...