Recruitment of representational components of the semantic system distinguishes successful from unsuccessful access to complex factual knowledge

Our ability to effectively retrieve complex semantic knowledge meaningfully impacts our daily lives, yet the neural processes that underly successful access and transient failures in access remain only partially understood. In this fMRI study, we contrast activation during successful semantic access, unsuccessful semantic access due to transient access-failures (i.e., tip-of-the-tongue, feeling-of-knowing), and trials where the semantic knowledge was not possessed. Twenty-four human participants (14 female) were presented 240 trivia-based questions relating to person, place, object or scholastic knowledge-domains. Analyses of the recall event indicated a relatively greater role of a dorsomedial section of the prefrontal cortex in unsuccessful semantic access and relatively greater recruitment of the pars orbitalis of the inferior frontal gyrus in successful access. Successful access was also associated with increased activation in knowledge-domain selective areas. Generally, knowledge-domain selective areas showed increased responses for both preferred and non-preferred stimulus classes. The exception was place-selective regions (PPA, TOS and RSC), which were recruited during unsuccessful access attempts for all stimulus domains. Collectively, these results suggest that prefrontal semantic control systems and classical spatial-knowledge selective regions work together to locate relevant information and that access to complex knowledge results in a broad activation of semantic representation extending to regions selective for other knowledge domains.