Arguments about the nature of concepts: Symbols, embodiment, and beyond

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Abstract

<p class="first" id="P1">How are the meanings of words, events and objects represented and organized in the brain? This question, perhaps more than any other in the field, probes some of the deepest and most foundational puzzles regarding the structure of the mind and brain. Accordingly it has spawned a field of inquiry that is diverse and multi-disciplinary, has led to the discovery of numerous empirical phenomena and spurred the development of a wide range of theoretical positions. This volume brings together the most recent theoretical developments from the leaders in the field, representing a range of viewpoints on issues of fundamental significance to a theory of meaning representation. Here we introduce the special issue by way of pulling out some key themes that cut across the contributions that form this volume and situating those themes in the broader literature. The core issues around which research on conceptual representation can be organized are: representational format, representational content, the organization of concepts in the brain, and the processing dynamics that govern interactions between the conceptual system and sensorimotor representations. We highlight areas where consensus has formed; for those areas where opinion is divided, we seek to clarify the relation of theory and evidence and to set in relief the bridging assumptions that undergird current discussions. </p>

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Grounded cognition.

Lawrence Barsalou (2008)

Grounded cognition rejects traditional views that cognition is computation on amodal symbols in a modular system, independent of the brain's modal systems for perception, action, and introspection. Instead, grounded cognition proposes that modal simulations, bodily states, and situated action underlie cognition. Accumulating behavioral and neural evidence supporting this view is reviewed from research on perception, memory, knowledge, language, thought, social cognition, and development. Theories of grounded cognition are also reviewed, as are origins of the area and common misperceptions of it. Theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues are raised whose future treatment is likely to affect the growth and impact of grounded cognition.

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J Haxby, M. I. Gobbini, M. Furey … (2001)

The functional architecture of the object vision pathway in the human brain was investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure patterns of response in ventral temporal cortex while subjects viewed faces, cats, five categories of man-made objects, and nonsense pictures. A distinct pattern of response was found for each stimulus category. The distinctiveness of the response to a given category was not due simply to the regions that responded maximally to that category, because the category being viewed also could be identified on the basis of the pattern of response when those regions were excluded from the analysis. Patterns of response that discriminated among all categories were found even within cortical regions that responded maximally to only one category. These results indicate that the representations of faces and objects in ventral temporal cortex are widely distributed and overlapping.

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Information-based functional brain mapping.

Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rainer Goebel, Peter A. Bandettini (2006)

The development of high-resolution neuroimaging and multielectrode electrophysiological recording provides neuroscientists with huge amounts of multivariate data. The complexity of the data creates a need for statistical summary, but the local averaging standardly applied to this end may obscure the effects of greatest neuroscientific interest. In neuroimaging, for example, brain mapping analysis has focused on the discovery of activation, i.e., of extended brain regions whose average activity changes across experimental conditions. Here we propose to ask a more general question of the data: Where in the brain does the activity pattern contain information about the experimental condition? To address this question, we propose scanning the imaged volume with a "searchlight," whose contents are analyzed multivariately at each location in the brain.