Abstract
Category-specific impairments witnessed in patients with semantic deficits have broadly dissociated into natural and artificial kinds. However, how the category of food (more specifically, fruits and vegetables) fits into this distinction has been difficult to interpret, given a pattern of deficit that has inconsistently mapped onto either kind, despite its intuitive membership to the natural domain. The present study explores the effects of a manipulation of a visual sensory (i.e., color) or functional (i.e., orientation) feature on the consequential semantic processing of fruits and vegetables (and tools, by comparison), first at the behavioral and then at the neural level. The categorization of natural (i.e., fruits/vegetables) and artificial (i.e., utensils) entities was investigated via cross–modal priming. Reaction time analysis indicated a reduction in priming for color-modified natural entities and orientation-modified artificial entities. Standard event-related potentials (ERP) analysis was performed, in addition to linear classification. For natural entities, a N400 effect at central channel sites was observed for the color-modified condition compared relative to normal and orientation conditions, with this difference confirmed by classification analysis. Conversely, there was no significant difference between conditions for the artificial category in either analysis. These findings provide strong evidence that color is an integral property to the categorization of fruits/vegetables, thus substantiating the claim that feature-based processing guides as a function of semantic category.
Highlights
IntroductionThe way in which semantic concepts are represented in the brain has been largely informed by neuropsychological studies with brain-damaged patients (for a review, see [1]) whose selective impairment in object recognition has been broadly distinguished between natural and artificial (manmade) entities
The way in which semantic concepts are represented in the brain has been largely informed by neuropsychological studies with brain-damaged patients whose selective impairment in object recognition has been broadly distinguished between natural and artificial entities
This finding is in line with previous semantic literature that has demonstrated an N400 effect for meaningless compared to meaningful stimuli [87]
Summary
The way in which semantic concepts are represented in the brain has been largely informed by neuropsychological studies with brain-damaged patients (for a review, see [1]) whose selective impairment in object recognition has been broadly distinguished between natural and artificial (manmade) entities. Several theories have been proposed to explain the structural organization of concepts in the brain These theories broadly fall into two general groups. Those that follow a correlated structure principle posit that, while the number of shared versus distinctive features between objects differs across categories, this conceptual distinction is not instantiated at the level of functional neuroanatomy. Those that ascribe to a neural structure principle claim instead that dissociable neural substrates are differentially involved in representing categories (for review, see [1]). Categories that possess high within-category similarity, such as that of fruits/vegetables, could be rendered more susceptible to deficit potentially due to a crowding effect of feature overlap that results in low discriminability at the basic level [6]
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