Abstract
ABSTRACT The anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is considered a crucial area for the representation of transmodal concepts. Recent evidence suggests that specific regions within the ATL support the representation of individual object concepts, as shown by studies combining multivariate analysis methods and explicit measures of semantic knowledge. This research looks to further our understanding by probing conceptual representations at a spatially and temporally resolved neural scale. Representational similarity analysis was applied to human intracranial recordings from anatomically defined lateral to medial ATL sub-regions. Neural similarity patterns were tested against semantic similarity measures, where semantic similarity was defined by a hybrid corpus-based and feature-based approach. Analyses show that the perirhinal cortex, in the medial ATL, significantly related to semantic effects around 200 to 400 ms, and were greater than more lateral ATL regions. Further, semantic effects were present in low frequency (theta and alpha) oscillatory phase signals. These results provide converging support that more medial regions of the ATL support the representation of basic-level visual object concepts within the first 400 ms, and provide a bridge between prior fMRI and MEG work by offering detailed evidence for the presence of conceptual representations within the ATL.
Highlights
No significant semantic-feature similarity effects were observed in any other anterior temporal lobe region, and peaks were prominent for the medial perirhinal in contrast to more lateral regions of the anterior temporal lobe (Fig 3B).1o
The anterior temporal lobes play a prominent role in many theories of semantic cognition, with different accounts placing a different emphasis on the contribution of individual cortical regions, or graded contributions across the lobe (Barense et al, 2011; Clarke and Tyler, 2015; Damasio et al, 2004; Grabowski et al, 2001; Mehta et al, 2016, 2016; Patterson et al, 2007; Ralph et al, 2017)
This research examined the representation of object semantics within sub-regions of the anterior temporal lobes
Summary
The Anterior temporal lobes (ATL) are considered a critical region in many theories of semantic memory, and function in a transmodal fashion Numerous studies have demonstrated that semantically related items have similar patterns of activation within the ATL (Bruffaerts et al, 2013; Chen et al, 2016; Clarke et al, 2018; Clarke and Tyler, 2014; Coutanche and Thompson-Schill, 2015; Kivisaari et al, 2019; Malone et al, 2016; Martin et al., 2018; Meyer and Damasio, 2009; Murphy et al, 2017; Peelen and Caramazza, 2012) Whilst these studies have used a variety of methods for determining semantic relatedness – ranging from superordinate category clustering to similarity between basic-level concepts - a powerful approach is to characterise the semantic similarity between individual concepts and compare this to the similarity of brain activations. Utilising human intracranial recordings allows for the testing of semantic representations during object recognition in high resolution neural activation patterns from anatomically distinct subregions within the ATL, providing important converging evidence
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