Anterior temporal lobe and the representation of knowledge about people
Name
Anzellotti-2017-Anterior temporal lobe and the.pdf
Size
592.39 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
acfa2e1f132dfe35ae737ebf7414afd0
Author(s)
Anzellotti, Stefano
Date Issued
April 2017
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Citation
Anzellotti, Stefano. “Anterior Temporal Lobe and the Representation of Knowledge about People.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 114, no. 16, Apr. 2017, pp. 4042–44. © 2017 National Academy of Sciences
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Patients with semantic dementia (SD), a neurodegenerative disease affecting the anterior temporal lobes (ATL) (1), present with striking cognitive deficits: they can have difficulties naming objects and familiar people from both pictures and descriptions (2, 3). Furthermore, SD patients make semantic errors (e.g., naming “horse” a picture of a zebra), suggesting that their impairment affects object knowledge rather than lexical retrieval. Because SD can affect object categories as disparate as artifacts, animals, and people, as well as multiple input modalities, it has been hypothesized that ATL is a semantic hub (4) that integrates information across multiple modality-specific brain regions into multimodal representations. With a series of converging experiments using multiple analysis techniques, Wang et al. (5) test the proposal that ATL is a semantic hub in the case of person knowledge, investigating whether ATL: (i) encodes multimodal representations of identity, and (ii) mediates the retrieval of knowledge about people from representations of perceptual cues.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1703438114