Body language in the brain: constructing meaning from expressive movement

Body language in the brain: constructing meaning from expressive movement

This fMRI study investigated neural systems that interpret body language-the meaningful emotive expressions conveyed by body movement. Participants watched videos of performers engaged in modern dance or pantomime that conveyed specific themes such as hope, agony, lust, or exhaustion. We tested whether the meaning of an affectively laden performance was decoded in localized brain substrates as ...

Children’s Expression 1 Running Head: MOVEMENT, MUSIC, AND EMOTION Children's Expression of Emotional Meaning in Music Through Expressive Body Movement

Constructing Meaning

This article reviews cognitive neuroscience research on visual and language processing to suggest an analogy between the neural interpolation mechanisms in perceptual processing and the constructive processes that underlie meaning construction in language. Traditional models of language comprehension as a decoding process are argued to involve an overattribution of the import of linguistic info...

Constructing Visual Perception of Body Movement with the Motor Cortex

The human brain readily perceives fluent movement from static input. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated brain mechanisms that mediate fluent apparent biological motion (ABM) perception from sequences of body postures. We presented body and nonbody stimuli varying in objective sequence duration and fluency of apparent movement. Three body postures were ordered to produc...

Constructing Meaning from Space, Gesture, and Speech