Conceptual Representations of Action in the Lateral Temporal Cortex
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
A Madness to the Methods in Cognitive Neuroscience?
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Listening to Action-related Sentences Activates Fronto-parietal Motor Circuits
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Neural Circuits Involved in the Recognition of Actions Performed by Nonconspecifics: An fMRI Study
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Neural Substrates of Action Event Knowledge
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Activation in Human MT/MST by Static Images with Implied Motion
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Effects of Syntactic Structure and Propositional Number on Patterns of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Domain-Specific Knowledge Systems in the Brain: The Animate-Inanimate Distinction
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Specificity of Action Representations in the Lateral Occipitotemporal Cortex
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Permutation, Parametric, and Bootstrap Tests of Hypotheses (Springer Series in Statistics)
Permutation, Parametric, and Bootstrap Tests of Hypotheses (Springer Series in Statistics)
Syntactic and Semantic Modulation of Neural Activity during Auditory Sentence Comprehension
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Temporal semantics: an extended definition for neural morphisms
IJCNN'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international joint conference on Neural Networks
Deconstructing events: The neural bases for space, time, and causality
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Independent representations of verbs and actions in left lateral temporal cortex
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Action concepts in the brain: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
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Lexical-semantic investigations in cognitive neuroscience have focused on conceptual knowledge of concrete objects. By contrast, relational concepts have been largely ignored. We examined thematic role and locative knowledge in 14 left-hemisphere-damage patients. Relational concepts shift cognitive focus away from the object to the relationship between objects, calling into question the relevance of traditional sensory-functional accounts of semantics. If extraction of a relational structure is the critical cognitive process common to both thematic and locative knowledge, then damage to neural structures involved in such an extraction would impair both kinds of knowledge. If the nature of the relationship itself is critical, then functional neuroanatomical dissociations should occur. Using a new lesion analysis method, we found that damage to the lateral temporal cortex produced deficits in thematic role knowledge and damage to inferior fronto-parietal regions produced deficits in locative knowledge. In addition, we found that conceptual knowledge of thematic roles dissociates from its mapping onto language. These relational knowledge deficits were not accounted for by deficits in processing nouns or verbs or by a general deficit in making inferences. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that manners of visual motion serve as a point of entry for thematic role knowledge and networks dedicated to eye gaze, whereas reaching and grasping serve as a point of entry for locative knowledge. Intermediary convergence zones that are topographically guided by these sensory-motor points of entry play a critical role in the semantics of relational concepts.