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Neural pathways of aversive words: Early somato-visceral and late temporal lobe dynamics
Poster B45 in Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai and Lise Girardin
Mariano Nicolás Díaz Rivera1, Agustina Birba1, Lucía Amoruso1, Juan Carlos Ávalos1, María del Carmen García1, Agustina Selser1, Miguel Martorell Caro1, Agustín Ibáñez1, Eugenia Hesse1, Adolfo García1; 1San Andrés University, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Background: Aversive words recruit somato-visceral and temporal systems, but the timing and lateralization of their engagement remain unclear. Clarifying this issue is critical for spatiotemporal models of semantic cognition, including hub-and-spokes accounts that remain agnostic about the sequencing of modality-specific and multimodal activations. Methods: We used intracranial EEG to examine how somato-visceral and temporal networks support processing of aversive words relative to neutral words. Five right-handed epilepsy patients (aged 24–51 years), implanted with 114 to 127 depth electrodes, performed a lexical decision task while somato-visceral, limbic, and temporal regions were recorded. Three patients had left-hemisphere and two had right-hemisphere implants. Each patient’s performance was compared to that of sociodemographically matched healthy controls. Time-frequency power (1–100 Hz) and phase-locked connectivity were quantified and assessed via cluster-based permutation statistics. Results: Accuracy exceeded 85% across patients, with no significant differences relative to healthy controls (all p-values > 0.40). In left-hemisphere implants, aversive words elicited early (< 200 ms) low-frequency (1–40 Hz) power enhancements confined to Rolandic, postcentral, and cingulate sites, with no temporal-network involvement. Later (> 200 ms) effects shifted predominantly into inferior, middle, and superior temporal gyri, with residual opercular and hippocampal activity. Aversive words also induced early phase-locked coupling between somato-visceral and temporal hubs across all left-hemisphere patients, whereas neutral words showed no early connectivity and only later, less specific synchronization. Right-hemisphere electrodes yielded sparse early somato-visceral responses limited to postcentral and anterior cingulate clusters, with late effects confined to transient high-gamma (40–100 Hz) bursts in posterior fusiform and Rolandic operculum and negligible temporal lobe engagement. Discussion: These findings reveal a left-dominant progression from early somato-visceral to later temporal activations during aversive words processing, supported by immediate phase-level integration between both systems. Collectively, patterns suggest that emotional word processing involves initial embodied reactivations in modality-specific regions with subsequent engagement of multimodal semantic hubs, affording precise temporal constraints for hub-and-spokes and grounded cognition models of conceptual processing.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration