University of Maryland LibrariesDigital Repository at the University of Maryland
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   DRUM
    • College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
    • Psychology
    • Psychology Research Works
    • View Item
    •   DRUM
    • College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
    • Psychology
    • Psychology Research Works
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    The emergence of semantic meaning in the ventral temporal pathway

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    jocn_a_00458.pdf (631.0Kb)
    No. of downloads: 104

    Date
    2014
    Author
    Carlson, Thomas A.
    Simmons, Ryan A.
    Kriegeskorte, Nikolaus
    Slevc, L. Robert
    Citation
    Carlson, T.C., Simmons, R.A., Kriegeskorte, N., & Slevc, L.R. (2014). The emergence of semantic meaning in the ventral temporal pathway. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(1), 120-131.
    DRUM DOI
    doi:10.13016/M22B8R
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    In the ventral visual pathway, early visual areas encode light patterns on the retina in terms of image properties, for example, edges and color, whereas higher areas encode visual information in terms of objects and categories. At what point does semantic knowledge, as instantiated in human language, emerge? We examined this question by studying whether semantic similarity in language relates to the brain's organization of object representations in inferior temporal cortex (ITC), an area of the brain at the crux of several proposals describing how the brain might represent conceptual knowledge. Semantic relationships among words can be viewed as a geometrical structure with some pairs of words close in their meaning (e.g., man and boy) and other pairs more distant (e.g., man and tomato). ITC's representation of objects similarly can be viewed as a complex structure with some pairs of stimuli evoking similar patterns of activation (e.g., man and boy) and other pairs evoking very different patterns (e.g., man and tomato). In this study, we examined whether the geometry of visual object representations in ITC bears a correspondence to the geometry of semantic relationships between word labels used to describe the objects. We compared ITC's representation to semantic structure, evaluated by explicit ratings of semantic similarity and by five computational measures of semantic similarity. We show that the representational geometry of ITC—but not of earlier visual areas (V1)—is reflected both in explicit behavioral ratings of semantic similarity and also in measures of semantic similarity derived from word usage patterns in natural language. Our findings show that patterns of brain activity in ITC not only reflect the organization of visual information into objects but also represent objects in a format compatible with conceptual thought and language.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1903/18896
    Collections
    • Psychology Research Works

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility
     

     

    Browse

    All of DRUMCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister
    Pages
    About DRUMAbout Download Statistics

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility