What Are the Facts of Semantic Category-Specific Deficits? A Critical Review of the Clinical Evidence

Capitani, Erminio; Laiacona, Marcella; Mahon, Bradford Z.; Caramazza, Alfonso

doi:10.1080/02643290244000266

Cited by 440 publications

(322 citation statements)

References 99 publications

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“…In addition, the mental representation of human faces may contain richer information that allows sub-ordinate distinctions between faces of different gender, race, age, etc. Such information might be absent or reduced from the representation of other objects for which humans are less experts, and are represented primarily according to their function (for a review see Capitani et al, 2003). Hence, the amplitude differences between iGBA elicited by human faces and other objects may reflect the amount of information contained in their respective neural representations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human face preference in gamma-frequency EEG activity

et al. 2008

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Previous studies demonstrated that induced EEG activity in the gamma band (iGBA) plays an important role in object recognition and is modulated by stimulus familiarity and its compatibility with pre-existent representations. In the present study we investigated the modulation of iGBA by the degree of familiarity and perceptual expertise that observers have with stimuli from different categories. Specifically, we compared iGBA in response to human faces versus stimuli which subjects are not expert with (ape faces, human hands, buildings and watches). iGBA elicited by human faces was higher and peaked earlier than that elicited by all other categories, which did not differ significantly from each other. These findings can be accounted for by two characteristics of perceptual expertise. One is the activation of a richer, stronger and, therefore, more easily accessible mental representation of human faces. The second is the more detailed perceptual processing necessary for within-category distinctions, which is the hallmark of perceptual expertise. In addition, the sensitivity of iGBA to human but not ape faces was contrasted with the face-sensitive N170-effect, which was similar for human and ape faces. In concert with previous studies, this dissociation suggests a multi-level neuronal model of face recognition, manifested by these two electrophysiological measures, discussed in this paper.Cognitive neuroscience research has been enriched during the last decade by studies associating high-frequency EEG activity with the generation of unified perceptual representations in both vision and audition, and the activation of pre-stored memory representations (Busch, et al., 2006;Kaiser and Lutzenberger, 2003). Changing the conception that physiologically pertinent EEG frequencies are lower than 20 Hz, studies in animals (Singer and Gray, 1995) and in humans (e.g. Tallon-Baudry et al., 1996, 2003Gruber et al. 2004Gruber et al. , 2005Rodriguez et al. 1999) explored activity in a range of frequencies higher than 20 Hz, which were addressed as "gamma-band". Specifically, many studies have associated between high-level perceptual mechanisms and the so-called "induced" gamma-band activity (iGBA; for review see Bertrand and Tallon-Baudry, 2000).iGBA is a measure for local neural synchronization appearing as bursts of high-frequency EEG activity which is event-related but is not necessarily phase locked to the stimulus onset (and thus may be cancelled out in traditional ERP analysis). The amplitude of these bursts is modulated by physical stimulus attributes such as size, contrast and spatial-frequency spectrum

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human face preference in gamma-frequency EEG activity

et al. 2008

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“…Nevertheless semantic knowledge about the body may be unusually resilient to impairment (e.g., Capitani, Laiacona, Mahon, & Caramazza, 2003;Gainotti, 2004;Kemmerer & Tranel, 2008). Indeed, in a large study of 104 patients with brain lesions, Kemmerer and Tranel (2008) found 10 patients with difficulty in verbal naming of body parts, but only a single case of (extremely mild) impairment for comprehension of body parts terms.…”

Section: Lexical-semantic Knowledge About Bodiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

More than skin deep: Body representation beyond primary somatosensory cortex

2010

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The neural circuits underlying initial sensory processing of somatic information are relatively well understood. In contrast, the processes that go beyond primary somatosensation to create more abstract representations related to the body are less clear. In this review, we focus on two classes of higher-order processing beyond somatosensation. Somatoperception refers to the process of perceiving the body itself, and particularly of ensuring somatic perceptual constancy.We review three key elements of somatoperception: (a) remapping information from the body surface into an egocentric reference frame (b) exteroceptive perception of objects in the external world through their contact with the body and (c) interoceptive percepts about the nature and state of the body itself. Somatorepresentation, in contrast, refers to the essentially cognitive process of constructing semantic knowledge and attitudes about the body, including: (d) lexicalsemantic knowledge about bodies generally and one's own body specifically, (e) configural knowledge about the structure of bodies, (f) emotions and attitudes directed towards one's own body, and (g) the link between physical body and psychological self. We review a wide range of neuropsychological, neuroimaging and neurophysiological data to explore the dissociation between these different aspects of higher somatosensory function.Body Beyond SI 3

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“…8-16; for reviews, see refs. [17][18][19] and category-specific brain activation patterns observed through functional neuroimaging (refs. 20-28; for a review, see ref.…”

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confidence: 99%

Effect of congenital blindness on the semantic representation of some everyday concepts

Connolly

Gleitman²,

Thompson-Schill³

2007

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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This study explores how the lack of first-hand experience with color, as a result of congenital blindness, affects implicit judgments about ''higher-order'' concepts, such as ''fruits and vegetables'' (FV), but not others, such as ''household items'' (HHI). We demonstrate how the differential diagnosticity of color across our test categories interacts with visual experience to produce, in effect, a category-specific difference in implicit similarity. Implicit pair-wise similarity judgments were collected by using an odd-man-out triad task. Pair-wise similarities for both FV and for HHI were derived from this task and were compared by using cluster analysis and regression analyses. Color was found to be a significant component in the structure of implicit similarity for FV for sighted participants but not for blind participants; and this pattern remained even when the analysis was restricted to blind participants who had good explicit color knowledge of the stimulus items. There was also no evidence that either subject group used color knowledge in making decisions about HHI, nor was there an indication of any qualitative differences between blind and sighted subjects' judgments on HHI.additive clustering ͉ color knowledge ͉ similarity

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What Are the Facts of Semantic Category-Specific Deficits? A Critical Review of the Clinical Evidence

Cited by 440 publications

References 99 publications

Human face preference in gamma-frequency EEG activity

Human face preference in gamma-frequency EEG activity

More than skin deep: Body representation beyond primary somatosensory cortex

Effect of congenital blindness on the semantic representation of some everyday concepts

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