The ability to generate and process semantic relations is central to many aspects of human cognition. Theorists have long debated whether such relations are coarsely coded as links in a semantic network or finely coded as distributed patterns over some core set of abstract relations. The form and content of the conceptual and neural representations of semantic relations are yet to be empirically established. Using sequential presentation of verbal analogies, we compared neural activities in making analogy judgments with predictions derived from alternative computational models of relational dissimilarity to adjudicate among rival accounts of how semantic relations are coded and compared in the brain. We found that a frontoparietal network encodes the three relation types included in the design. A computational model based on semantic relations coded as distributed representations over a pool of abstract relations predicted neural activities for individual relations within the left superior parietal cortex and for second-order comparisons of relations within a broader left-lateralized network.

生成和处理语义关系的能力是人类认知许多方面​​的核心。长期以来，理论家一直在争论这种关系是粗略地编码为语义网络中的链接，还是精细地编码为某些核心抽象关系集上的分布式模式。语义关系的概念和神经表征的形式和内容尚待经验建立。使用口头类比的顺序表示，我们将类比判断中的神经活动与从关系差异的替代计算模型得出的预测进行了比较，以在大脑中对语义关系进行编码和比较的竞争性描述中做出判断。我们发现额顶网络对设计中包含的三种关系类型进行编码。