Event Structure Perception

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In order to comprehend the continuous stream of cacophonies and visual stimulation that battle for our attention, humans will breakdown activities into smaller, more digestible chunks, a phenomenon that psychologists describe as "event structure perception."

Event structure perception was originally believed to be confined to our visual system, but new research shows that a similar process occurs when reading about everyday events as well.

Nicole Speer and her colleagues at Washington University examined event structure perception by having subjects read narratives about everyday activities while undergoing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure neural activity. The subjects were then invited back a few days later to reread these same narratives, this time without the fMRI scan. Instead, they were asked to divide the narrative where they believed one segment of narrative activity ended and another segment began.

Speer, surmised that if changes in neural activity occurred at the same points that the subjects divided the stories, then it could be safe to suggest that humans are physiologically disposed to break down activities into narratives (remember that the same subjects had no idea during the first part of the experiment that they would later be asked to segment the story).

As expected, activity in certain areas of the brain increased at the points that subjects had identified as the beginning or end of a segment, otherwise known as an "event boundary." Consistent with previous research, such boundaries tended to occur during transitions in the narrative such as changes of location or a shift in the character's goals. Researchers have hypothesized that readers break down narrated activities into smaller chunks when they are reading stories. However, this is the first study to demonstrate that this process occurs naturally during reading, and to identify some of the brain regions that are involved in this process.

The fact that these results occurred with narratives that described mundane events is particularly important to our understanding of how humans comprehend everyday activity. Speer writes that the findings "provide evidence not only that readers are able to identify the structure of narrated activities, but also that this process of segmenting continuous text into discrete events occurs during normal reading."

In addition, a subset of the network of brain regions that also responds to event boundaries while subjects view movies of everyday events was activated. Speer believes that "this similarity between processing of visual and narrated activities may be more than mere coincidence, and may reflect the existence of a general network for understanding event structure." Future research will ultimately address the relationship between the two perception systems, and whether a global mechanism underlies event structure perception.

Article: "Human Brain Activity Time-Locked to Narrative Event Boundaries " May issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Green Tea

A new study from the University of Michigan Health System suggests that a compound in green tea may provide therapeutic benefits to people with rheumatoid arthritis. Credit: Stockphoto Science Daily


The compound from green tea was found to suppress the inflammatory products in the connective tissue of people with rheumatoid arthritis.

The study, presented April 29 at the Experimental Biology 2007 in Washington, D.C., looks at a potent anti-inflammatory compound derived from green tea. Researchers found that the compound – called epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) – inhibited the production of several molecules in the immune system that contribute to inflammation and joint damage in people with rheumatoid arthritis.

To conduct the research, the scientists isolated cells called synovial fibroblasts from the joints of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. These fibroblasts – cells that form a lining of the tissue surrounding the capsule of the joints – then were cultured in a growth medium and incubated with the green tea compound.

The fibroblasts were then stimulated with pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-1b, a protein of the immune system known to play an important role in causing joint destruction in people with rheumatoid arthritis. The researchers looked at whether the green tea compound has the capability to block the activity of two potent molecules, IL-6 and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), which also are actively involved in causing boneerosion in the joints of people with rheumatoid arthritis.

When untreated cells were stimulated with IL-1b, a sequence of molecular events occurred that resulted in production of the bone-destructive molecules. But the scientists found that pre-incubation with EGCG was capable of inhibiting the production of these molecules. EGCG also inhibited the production of prostaglandin E2, a hormone-like substance that causes inflammation in the joints.

The cell signaling pathways that regulate levels of these immune system molecules under both normal and rheumatoid arthritis situations are well studied, and the researchers were able to trace the effects of the green tea compound infusion to see that it worked by inhibiting these pathways.

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