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Neurocognitive insights on conceptual knowledge and its breakdown
M.A. Lambon Ralph
Philosophical Transactions Royal Society B. 2013;.
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Abstract
Conceptual knowledge reflects our multimodal ‘semantic database’. As such, it brings meaning to all verbal and nonverbal stimuli, is the foundation for verbal and nonverbal expression, and provides the basis for computing appropriate semantic generalisations. Multiple disciplines (e.g., philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and behavioural neurology) have striven to answer the questions of how concepts are formed, how they are represented in the brain, and how they break down differentially in various neurological patient groups. A long-standing and prominent hypothesis is that concepts are distilled from our multimodal verbal and nonverbal experience such that sensation in one modality (e.g., the smell of an apple) not only activates the intra-modality long-term knowledge, but also reactivates the relevant inter-modality information about that item (i.e., all the things you know about and can do with an apple). This multimodal view of conceptualisation fits with contemporary functional neuroimaging studies that observe systematic variation of activation across different modality-specific association regions dependent on the conceptual category or type of information. A second vein of interdisciplinary work argues, however, that even a smorgasbord of multimodal features is insufficient to build coherent, generalisable concepts. Instead, an additional process or intermediate representation is required. Recent multidisciplinary work, which combines neuropsychology, neuroscience and computational models, offers evidence that conceptualisation follows from a combination of modality-specific sources of information plus a transmodal “hub” representational system that is supported primarily by regions within the anterior temporal lobe, bilaterally.