Cross-decoding reveals shared brain activity patterns between saccadic eye-movements and semantic processing of implicitly spatial words

Processing words with referents that are typically observed up or down in space (up/down words) influences the subsequent identification of visual targets in congruent locations. Eye-tracking studies have shown that up/down word comprehension shortens launch times of subsequent saccades to congruent locations and modulates concurrent saccade trajectories. This can be explained by a task-dependent interaction of semantic processing and oculomotor programs or by a direct recruitment of direction-specific processes in oculomotor and spatial systems as part of semantic processing. To test the latter possibility, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment and used multi-voxel pattern analysis to assess 1) whether the typical location of word referents can be decoded from the fronto-parietal spatial network and 2) whether activity patterns are shared between up/down words and up/down saccadic eye movements. In line with these hypotheses, significant decoding of up vs. down words and cross-decoding between up/down saccades and up/down words were observed in the frontal eye field region in the superior frontal sulcus and the inferior parietal lobule. Beyond these spatial attention areas, typical location of word referents could be decoded from a set of occipital, temporal, and frontal areas, indicating that interactions between high-level regions typically implicated with lexical-semantic processing and spatial/oculomotor regions constitute the neural basis for access to spatial aspects of word meanings.