Distinct Brain Systems for Processing Concrete and Abstract Concepts

Binder, Jeffrey R.; Westbury, Chris; McKiernan, K.A.; Possing, Edward T.; Medler, David A.

doi:10.1162/0898929054021102

Cited by 551 publications

(532 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Indeed, as shown in Supplementary Table S5 and Figure S1, longer RTs were indeed associated with activity in a distributed cortical network consistent with regions observed in previous studies examining the executive aspects of semantic memory use (Badre et al, 2005;Binder et al, 2005;Goldberg et al, 2007;Hoffman et al, 2010;Raposo et al, 2012;Satpute et al, 2014). Critically, the imaging results presented below are statistically independent of these RT effects.…”

Section: Behavioral Resultssupporting

confidence: 86%

The neural basis of conceptualizing the same action at different levels of abstraction

Spunt

Kemmerer

Adolphs

2015

Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci

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People can conceptualize the same action (e.g. 'riding a bike') at different levels of abstraction (LOA), where higher LOAs specify the abstract motives that explain why the action is performed (e.g. 'getting exercise'), while lower LOAs specify the concrete steps that indicate how the action is performed (e.g. 'gripping handlebars'). Prior neuroimaging studies have shown that why and how questions about actions differentially activate two cortical networks associated with mental-state reasoning and action representation, respectively; however, it remains unknown whether this is due to the differential demands of the questions per se or to the shifts in LOA those questions produce. We conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants judged pairs of action phrases that varied in LOA and that could be framed either as a why question (Why ride a bike? Get exercise.) or a how question (How to get exercise? Ride a bike.). Question framing (why vs how) had no effect on activity in regions of the two networks. Instead, these regions uniquely tracked parametric variation in LOA, both across and within trials. This suggests that the human capacity to understand actions at different LOA is based in the relative activity of two cortical networks.

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Section: Behavioral Resultssupporting

confidence: 86%

The neural basis of conceptualizing the same action at different levels of abstraction

Spunt

Kemmerer

Adolphs

2015

Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci

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“…The resulting ratings, therefore, may reflect different decision criteria at the concrete and abstract ends of the scale, which is consistent with previous observations that the concreteness ratings scale has a bimodal distribution (e.g., Kousta et al, 2011). Imageability ratings are frequently used interchangeably with concreteness ratings (e.g., Binder et al, 2005;Sabsevitz et al, 2005) because of their high correlation and theoretical relationship in dual coding theory. Instructions for imageability ratings repeatedly refer to arousing a "mental image" (Paivio et al, 1968, p. 4), which is likely to lead naïve participants to focus on vision at the expense of other modalities.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…A long history of research has examined processing differences between such abstract and concrete concepts. In particular, concreteness effects refer to a behavioral advantage for words that refer to concrete concepts, which are processed more quickly and accurately than abstract concepts in tasks such as lexical decision and word naming (e.g., Binder et al, 2005;James, 1975;Kroll & Merves, 1986;Schwanenflugel, Harnishfeger & Stowe, 1988;Schwanenflugel & Stowe, 1989).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strength of perceptual experience predicts word processing performance better than concreteness or imageability

Connell¹,

Lynott²

2012

Cognition

206

288

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concepts are traditionally thought to differ from concrete concepts by their lack of perceptual information, which causes them to be processed more slowly and inaccurately than perceptually-based concrete concepts. We examined this assumption by comparing concreteness and imageability norms to a set of perceptual strength norms in five separate modalities: sound, taste, touch, smell and vision. Results showed that that concreteness and imageability do not actually reflect the perceptual basis of concepts: concreteness ratings appear to be based on two different intersecting decision criteria, and imageability ratings are visually biased. Analysis of lexical decision and word naming performance showed that maximum perceptual strength (i.e., strength in the dominant perceptual modality) consistently outperformed both concreteness and imageability in accounting for variance in response latency and accuracy. We conclude that so-called concreteness effects in word processing emerge from the perceptual strength of a concept's representation and discuss the implications for theories of conceptual representation.

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“…Several authors have reported stronger activation in this general region (and surrounding extrastriate cortex) for reading word-like pseudowords compared to words (Binder et al, 2005a;Kronbichler et al, 2004;Mechelli et al, 2003;Price et al, 1996;Xu et al, 2001). It seems very likely that this difference is related to the longer processing time and visual attention required for reading pseudowords, as the same region showed activation correlated with RT during overt word and pseudoword naming (peak at −42, −55, −10) (Binder et al, 2005a) and during a visual lexical decision task (peak at −42, −52, −17) (Binder et al, 2005b) and was activated by covert shifts of visual attention in an experiment using meaningless geometric shapes to cue the spatial location of targets (peak at −45, −69, −6) (Gitelman et al, 1999). Thus, this general region of visual extrastriate cortex appears to be sensitive to task difficulty and attentional modulation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tuning of the human left fusiform gyrus to sublexical orthographic structure

et al. 2006

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Neuropsychological and neurophysiological evidence point to a role for the left fusiform gyrus in visual word recognition, but the specific nature of this role remains a topic of debate. The aim of this study was to measure the sensitivity of this region to sublexical orthographic structure. We measured blood oxygenation (BOLD) changes in the brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging while fluent readers of English viewed meaningless letter strings. The stimuli varied systematically in their approximation to English orthography, as measured by the probability of occurrence of letters and sequential letter pairs (bigrams) comprising the string. A whole-brain analysis showed a single region in the lateral left fusiform gyrus where BOLD signal increased with letter sequence probability; no other brain region showed this response pattern. The results suggest tuning of this cortical area to letter probabilities as a result of perceptual experience and provide a possible neural correlate for the 'word superiority effect' observed in letter perception research.Much evidence supports the idea that perceptual systems become selectively efficient at processing inputs that are encountered frequently. In learning a written language, for example, human brains appear to become tuned to the recurring visual patterns of the language represented in its orthographic structure. This is illustrated by the fact that letters embedded in words (such as S in the English word FLASH) or in word-like letter strings (S in FRISH) are more efficiently recognized than letters embedded in unusual letter strings (S in RFHSL) (McClelland and Rumelhart, 1981;Reicher, 1969). Such evidence suggests that normal readers use information about frequently recurring letter combinations, encoded as a result of experience with a specific written language, to more efficiently perceive and identify letters and letter strings.Neuropsychological evidence for an orthographic processor in the brain comes from patients who exhibit 'letter-by-letter reading' after left occipitotemporal brain injury (Binder and Mohr, 1992;Cohen et al., 2003;Leff et al., 2001;Sakurai et al., 2000). Such patients have normal language functions, including good recognition of single letters, but show profoundly impaired processing of letter strings, suggesting focal damage to systems responsible for storing or using orthographic information (Behrmann et al., 1998;Patterson and Kay, 1982;Warrington and Shallice, 1980). This localization is supported by neuroimaging experiments in normal readers, which have identified a region in the lateral left fusiform (occipitotemporal) gyrus that responds more strongly to words and word-like nonwords than to consonant letter strings or nonsense characters Dehaene et al., 2001;Polk and Farah, 2002 1999). Several elegant studies showed that this orthographic system employs an abstract code that is unaffected by changes in letter case (Dehaene et al., 2001Polk and Farah, 2002).Although activation in this brain region appears to be relat...

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Distinct Brain Systems for Processing Concrete and Abstract Concepts

Cited by 551 publications

References 51 publications

The neural basis of conceptualizing the same action at different levels of abstraction

The neural basis of conceptualizing the same action at different levels of abstraction

Strength of perceptual experience predicts word processing performance better than concreteness or imageability

Tuning of the human left fusiform gyrus to sublexical orthographic structure

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