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Category-specific knowledge disorders are among the most intriguing and perplexing syndromes in cognitive neuropsychology. The past decade has witnessed increased interest in these disorders, due largely to a heightened appreciation of the profound implications that an understanding of concept representation has for such diverse topics as object recognition, the organisation of the lexicon, and storage of long-term memories. Until recently, information about the representation of concepts was limited to findings from patients with brain injury and disease. This state of affairs has now changed with the advent and wide-spread availability of functional imaging for studying cognition in the normal human brain. The purpose of this special issue is to provide a forum for new findings and critical, theoretical analyses of existing data from patient and functional brain imaging studies. The contributions, all from major investigators in the field, range from studies of specific object categories such as animals, tools, fruit and vegetables, and faces, to the more general domains of number processing, social interaction, and mechanical knowledge. A unifying theme of these papers is the extent to which the findings can be best understood within the context of models that posit an innate, domain-specific organisation, those that appeal to an organisation by sensory- and motor-based features and properties, and those that propose an undifferentiated, distributed neural organisation.
The purpose of this special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology is to provide a forum for new findings and critical, theoretical analyses of existing data from patient and functional brain imaging studies.
We here examine the relationship between similarity and inductive inference, as well as the relationship between those types of judgments and neural representations of knowledge. We first present a model of category-based induction that estimates the probabilities of conditional sentences from the similarities and probabilities that govern their constituents (Chapter 2). We then present data from a published experiment showing that similarity information is retrievable from patterns of neural activity collected when participants are simply judging the category membership of images: Simple vectorwise metrics and measures derived from machine learning can extract similarities from the lateral occipital cortex that correlate strongly with similarity judgment (Chapter 3). Finally, we present results using new fMRI data that replicate our ability to extract similarity information from lateral occipital as well as posterior temporal cortices (BA 37) and show that those similarities, when supplied to our model, yield excellent predictions of probability rated for conditional sentences. Information-based analyses pick out regions strongly overlapping the lateral occipital and posterior temporal cortices as highly informative about conditional probability (Chapter 4). Curiously, however, rated similarity does not predict conditional probability when supplied to our model; this matter is discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall, our results support the storage of semantic knowledge in distributed patterns of activity over sensory areas and the usefulness of similarity derived from simple operations on that knowledge as an input to inductive judgment.
To understand the mind, we need to draw equally on the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience. But these two fields have very separate intellectual roots, and very different styles. So how can these two be reconciled in order to develop a full understanding of the mind and brain.This is the focus of this landmark new book.
A mechanistic theory of the representation and use of semantic knowledge that uses distributed connectionist networks as a starting point for a psychological theory of semantic cognition.
A rich source of authoritative information that supports reading and study in the field of cognitive neuroscience, this two-volume handbook reviews the current state-of-the-science in all major areas of the field.
Some of the most fascinating deficits in neuropsychology concern the failure to recognise common objects from one semantic category, such as living things, when there is no such difficulty with objects from another, such as non-living things. Over the past twenty years, numerous cases of these 'category specific' recognition and naming problems have been documented and several competing theories have been developed to account for the patients' disorders. Category Specificity in Brain and Mind draws together the neuropsychological literature on category-specific impairments, with research on how children develop knowledge about different categories, functional brain imaging work and computational models of object recognition and semantic memory. The chapters are written by internationally leading psychologists and neuroscientists and the result is a review of the most up-to-date thinking on how knowledge about different categories is acquired and organized in the mind, and where it is represented in the human brain. The text will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and researchers in the field of category specificity and a rich source of information for neuropsychologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers.
The study of concepts has advanced dramatically in recent years, with exciting new findings and theoretical developments. Core concepts have been investigated in greater depth and new lines of inquiry have blossomed, with researchers from an ever broader range of disciplines making important contributions. In this volume, leading philosophers and cognitive scientists offer original essays that present the state-of-the-art in the study of concepts. These essays, all commissioned for this book, do not merely present the usual surveys and overviews; rather, they offer the latest work on concepts by a diverse group of theorists as well as discussions of the ideas that should guide research over the next decade.
Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, Second Edition presents the study of categories and the process of categorization as viewed through the lens of the founding disciplines of the cognitive sciences, and how the study of categorization has long been at the core of each of these disciplines. The literature on categorization reveals there is a plethora of definitions, theories, models and methods to apprehend this central object of study. The contributions in this handbook reflect this diversity. For example, the notion of category is not uniform across these contributions, and there are multiple definitions of the notion of concept. Furthermore, the study of category and categorization is approached differently within each discipline. For some authors, the categories themselves constitute the object of study, whereas for others, it is the process of categorization, and for others still, it is the technical manipulation of large chunks of information. Finally, yet another contrast has to do with the biological versus artificial nature of agents or categorizers. Defines notions of category and categorization Discusses the nature of categories: discrete, vague, or other Explores the modality effects on categories Bridges the category divide - calling attention to the bridges that have already been built, and avenues for further cross-fertilization between disciplines
In this thesis, the author describes the functional contribution of different brain areas to language and knowledge processes and he sheds light on disease mechanisms underlying cognitive dysfunction in patients with neurodegenerative disorders.