Timecourse and convergence of abstract and concrete knowledge in the anterior temporal lobe.
Vignali, L.; Xu, Y.; Turini, J.; Collignon, O.; Crepaldi, D.; Bottini, R.
Show abstract
How is conceptual knowledge organized and retrieved by the brain? Recent evidence points to the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) as a crucial semantic hub integrating both abstract and concrete conceptual features according to a dorsal-to-medial gradient. It is however unclear when this conceptual gradient emerges and how semantic information reaches the ATL during conceptual retrieval. Here we used a multiple regression approach to magnetoencephalography signals of spoken words, combined with dimensionality reduction in concrete and abstract semantic feature spaces. Results showed that the dorsal-to-medial abstract-to-concrete ATL gradient emerges only in late stages of word processing: Abstract and concrete semantic information are initially encoded in posterior temporal regions and travel along separate cortical pathways eventually converging in the ATL. The present finding sheds light on the neural dynamics of conceptual processing that shape the organization of knowledge in the anterior temporal lobe.
Matching journals
The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Stimulus-independent neural coding of event semantics: Evidence from cross-sentence fMRI decoding 97%
- No evidence for functional distinctions across fronto-temporal language regions in their temporal receptive windows 97%
- A common neural code for meaning in discourse production and comprehension 97%
Similar papers in this journal
- Controlled retrieval relies on directed interactions between semantic control regions and visual cortex: MEG evidence from oscillatory dynamics 98%
- Dimensionality and ramping: Signatures of sentence integration in the dynamics of brains and deep language models 98%
- A Distributed Network for Multimodal Experiential Representation of Concepts 97%
Similar papers in this journal
- Context Free and Context-Dependent Conceptual Representation in the Brain 97%
- A middle ground where executive control meets semantics: The neural substrates of semantic-control are topographically sandwiched between the multiple-demand and default-mode systems 97%
- Objects sharpen visual scene representations: evidence from MEG decoding 97%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.