The organization of conceptual knowledge: the evidence from category-specific semantic deficits.

By Alfonso Caramazza, Bradford Z. Mahon. 2003

369 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Questions about the organization of conceptual knowledge in the human brain can be addressed by studying patients with category-specific semantic deficits: disproportionate and even selective impairment of conceptual knowledge of one category of objects compared with other categories. Recently, consensus has emerged regarding the basic facts of category-specific semantic deficits: (1) the categories that can be disproportionately impaired or spared are 'animals', 'fruit/vegetables', and 'artifacts'; and (2) category-specific semantic deficits are not associated with disproportionate deficits for a type or modality of knowledge. Together with findings in functional neuroimaging, these data indicate a complex organization of conceptual knowledge characterized by several independent dimensions of organization.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Meta-Consolidation for Continual Learning (2020, background): “Studies of the human brain suggest that knowledge and skills to solve tasks are represented in a meta-space of concepts with a high-level semantic basis [28, 10, 50].”
Constraints on Implicit Learning of Grammatical Form-Meaning Connections (2012, background): “Caramazza and Mahon (2003) argued that there is neural specificity of representations of animals, fruit/vegetables, and artifacts, respectively, and that this differentiation is the result of evolutionary pressure to develop dedicated, and highly efficient, neural circuits for processing types of st”
Category-specific organization in the human brain does not require visual experience (2009, neutral): “An alternative view is that category preferences in the ventral stream are determined, in part, by dimensions of similarity that cannot be reduced to the visual experience of individuals (e.g., Caramazza and Mahon, 2003; Mahon et al., 2007).”
Conceptual representations in mind and brain: theoretical developments, current evidence and future directions. (2012, background): “…conceptual representations have given up the notion of a unitary conceptual memory system and propose innate distinct conceptual subsystems that dissect the semantic space in an a priori fashion, for example into animals, fruit, tools, etc (Caramazza and Mahon, 2003; Caramazza and Shelton, 1998).”
Hypernetworks for Continual Semi-Supervised Learning (2021, neutral): “As per the studies of the human brain, the semantic knowledge or ability to solve tasks is represented in a meta-space of high-level semantic concepts [Handjaras et al. , 2016; Caramazza and Mahon, 2003; Mahon et al. , 2009].”
The mind behind anthropomorphic thinking: attribution of mental states to other species (2015, background): “For example, the processing of objects and subjects is segregated in the visual ventral pathway (Caramazza & Mahon, 2003; Caramazza & Shelton, 1998; Chao, Haxby, & Martin, 1999; Mahon, Anzellotti, Schwarzbach, Zampini, & Caramazza, 2009; Martin, 2007), and there is evidence for two differentiated…”
How concepts are encoded in the human brain: A modality independent, category-based cortical organization of semantic knowledge (2016, background): “Within this view, the high-level semantic systemwould comprise a multidimensional space of semantic properties to represent concepts (Caramazza and Mahon, 2003).”