Conversion of object identity to object-general semantic value in the primate temporal cortex

Tamura, Keita; Takeda, Masaki; Setsuie, Rieko; Tsubota, Tadashi; Hirabayashi, Toshiyuki; Miyamoto, Katsuhiro; Miyashita, Yasushi

doi:10.1126/science.aan4800

Cited by 52 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 95 publications

(39 reference statements)

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“…Much more substantial are the distinct roles of dorsolateral and ventromedial ATL in conceptual processing, reflecting the distinction between "abstract" and "concrete" concepts, respectively. This finding is in accord with research linking the medial aspect of ATL, and particularly the perirhinal cortex, to processing of sensorially-derived conceptual properties of objects 1,20,[33][34][35][36] . The functional dissociation we find between dorsolateral and ventromedial ATL is also in agreement with a the neuropsychological literature dealing with specific deficits for processing concrete concepts more than abstract ones in semantic dementia and some stroke patients -the reverse concreteness effect [37][38][39] and in patients with ATL resection 40 .…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

How do blind people represent rainbows? Disentangling components of conceptual representations

Striem-Amit

Wang

et al. 2018

Preprint

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How do we represent information that has no sensory features? How are abstract concepts like "freedom", devoid of external perceptible referents, represented in the brain? To address the role of sensory information in the neural representation of concepts, we investigated how people born blind process concepts whose referents are imperceptible to them because of their visual nature (e.g. "rainbow", or "red"). We find that the left dorsal anterior temporal lobe (ATL) shows preference both to typical abstract concepts ("freedom") and to concepts whose referents are not sensorially-available to the blind ("rainbow"), as compared to partially sensorially-perceptible referents (e.g. "rain"). Activation pattern similarity in dorsal ATL is related to the sensorial-accessibility ratings of the concepts in the blind. Parts of inferior-lateral aspects of ATL and the temporal pole responded preferentially to abstract concepts devoid of any external referents ("freedom") relative to imperceptible objects, in effect distinguishing between object and non-object concepts. The medial ATL showed a preference for concrete concepts ("cup"), along with a preference for partly perceptible items to the blind ("rain", as compared with "rainbow"), indicating this region's role in representing concepts with sensory referents beyond vision. The findings point to a new division of labor among medial, dorsal and lateral aspects of ATL in representing different properties of object and non-object concepts. IntroductionHow do we represent concepts that extend beyond our perceptual experience, concepts like "freedom" and "justice", which have no clear external referent? And how do blind people represent concepts such as rainbow, whose referent is perceptible only visually and comprised of colors, which are uniquely visual qualia?Various studies have addressed the neural correlates of concrete and abstract concepts 1-4 . Because concrete concepts, like "cup", have perceptible features, such as shape, size and color, whereas abstract concepts, like "freedom", lack sensory features, it has been proposed that the latter type of concepts rely more heavily on semantic or verbal information 5,6 . Therefore, the inspection of how abstract concepts are represented has been considered an important way to understand language and knowledge representation in the brain. Traditionally, this has been tested by comparing brain responses to abstract concepts to those generated by concrete ones (like "cup"). This comparison has revealed large-scale networks of regions associated with abstract concepts involving language areas and concrete concepts involving modality-specific areas 2,7-10 .However, there are additional differences between abstract and concrete concepts beyond the existence of external sensory referents. Abstract concepts tend to be learned later in life, be less familiar 11,12 and some of them refer to emotional contents 13,14 , potentially providing an emotional (internal) "sensory" referent. Furthermore, abstract concepts are more ambiguous and...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

How do blind people represent rainbows? Disentangling components of conceptual representations

Striem-Amit

Wang

et al. 2018

Preprint

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“…This reliance of stimulation effect on different brain activity is in line with the MTL single unit activity in primates: A small difference in the specific neuronal population of the MTL could produce opposite behavioral effects through stimulating certain stimulus (i.e., task) selective neurons [53]. In similar reasoning, prior human iEEG study explored brain's encoding state-dependent modulation, showing that the effect of the stimulation on brain function depend on the state of neural activity at the time the stimulation is applied [25].…”

Section: Task-dependent Effects Of Hippocampal Stimulation On Memorymentioning

confidence: 60%

Task-dependent effects of intracranial hippocampal stimulation on human memory and hippocampal theta power

et al. 2020

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Background: Despite its potential to revolutionize the treatment of memory dysfunction, the efficacy of direct electrical hippocampal stimulation for memory performance has not yet been well characterized. One of the main challenges to cross-study comparison in this area of research is the diversity of the cognitive tasks used to measure memory performance. Objective: We hypothesized that the tasks that differentially engage the hippocampus may be differentially influenced by hippocampal stimulation and the behavioral effects would be related to the underlying hippocampal activity. Methods: To investigate this issue, we recorded intracranial EEG from and directly applied stimulation to the hippocampus of 10 epilepsy patients while they performed two different verbal memory tasks e a word pair associative memory task and a single item memory task. Results: Hippocampal stimulation modulated memory performance in a task-dependent manner, improving associative memory performance, while impairing item memory performance. In addition, subjects with poorer baseline cognitive function improved much more with stimulation. iEEG recordings from the hippocampus during non-stimulation encoding blocks revealed that the associative memory task elicited stronger theta oscillations than did item memory and that stronger theta power was related to memory performance. Conclusions: We show here for the first time that stimulation-induced associative memory enhancement was linked to increased theta power during retrieval. These results suggest that hippocampal stimulation enhances associative memory but not item memory because it engages more hippocampal theta activity and that, in general, increasing hippocampal theta may provide a neural mechanism for successful memory enhancement.

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“…An interesting observation is that in macaque monkeys, the ILF connects the occipital to the temporal region, due to the absence of the MTG, and leads from there to a less developed ventral route (Thiebaut de Schotten, Dell'Acqua, Valabregue, & Catani, 2012). This might match the lexical and semantic abilities of primates, but the size of their vocabulary is limited (Tamura et al, 2017). An obvious vital function of the rpSTS is to process different functions in the language stream.…”

Section: Connectivity Patterns Of the Psts Subregionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rostro‐caudal organization of the human posterior superior temporal sulcus revealed by connectivity profiles

Chen

Fan

Xia

et al. 2018

Human Brain Mapping

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The posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) plays an important role in biological motion perception but is also thought to be essential for speech and facial processing. However, although there are many previous investigations of distinct functional modules within the pSTS, the functional organization of the pSTS in its full functional heterogeneity has not yet been established. Here we applied a connectivity‐based parcellation strategy to delineate the human pSTS subregions based on distinct anatomical connectivity profiles and divided it into rostral and caudal subregions using diffusion tensor imaging. Subsequent multimodal connection pattern analyses revealed distinct subregional connectivity profiles. From this we inferred that the two subregions are involved in distinct functional circuits, the language processing loop and the cognition attention network. These results indicate a convergent functional architecture of the pSTS that can be revealed based on different types of connectivity and is reflected in different functions and interactions. In addition, when the subregions were performing their processing in the different functional circuits, we found asymmetry in the bilateral pSTS. Our findings may improve the understanding of the functional organization of the pSTS and provide new insights into its interactions and integration of information at the subregional level.

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Conversion of object identity to object-general semantic value in the primate temporal cortex

Cited by 52 publications

References 95 publications

How do blind people represent rainbows? Disentangling components of conceptual representations

How do blind people represent rainbows? Disentangling components of conceptual representations

Task-dependent effects of intracranial hippocampal stimulation on human memory and hippocampal theta power

Rostro‐caudal organization of the human posterior superior temporal sulcus revealed by connectivity profiles

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