Functional MRI Studies of Semantic Memory

Over a lifetime, people amass extensive perceptual and verbal knowledge about the world, referred to as semantic memory. Evidence suggests that this memory store occupies a large extent of the temporal and inferior parietal lobe neocortex. This discussion will focus on two fMRI experiments aimed at clarifying the organization of this system. The first addresses how knowledge about concrete objects is represented, how this knowledge is related to perceptual experience, and how perceptual theories of object knowledge can account for category-related dissociations in brain damaged individuals. The second study addresses how combinations of distinct concepts are jointly processed, as commonly occurs during sentence comprehension. The claim will be made that building a complex representation of meaning through conceptual combination is one of the primary tasks of the human temporal and inferior parietal association cortex.