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Neural pathways of aversive words: Early somato-visceral and late temporal lobe dynamics
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
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