ABSTRACT

Background

The ability to efficiently select specific aspects of our semantic representations that are relevant for current goals or the context is supported by semantic control processes (controlled semantic cognition framework). This semantic control component is impaired in patients with semantic aphasia, who have multimodal semantic impairment following left hemisphere stroke and are highly sensitive to the control demands of semantic tasks. However, relatively little is known about how this control deficit interacts with aspects of semantic representation.

Aims

Here we tested whether the relevance of semantic features can influence the demands of control resources in the selection of information within the semantic store in patients with semantic aphasia.

Methods & Procedure

Participants performed a feature selection task, where they were asked to indicate which of three features was semantically related to a given concept.

Outcomes & Results

We found that patients with semantic aphasia had a greater impairment on low relevance features, suggesting that the selection of target features with low relevance requires greater semantic control than target features with high relevance.

Conclusions

Our results confirm the necessity of control processes for the selection of aspects of conceptual knowledge that are only weakly activated within semantic storage when these are task-relevant. The study therefore highlights that semantic cognition emerges from the interaction of control and representational systems.

中文翻译：

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语义控制缺陷不成比例地影响低相关性概念特征：来自语义失语症的证据

摘要

背景

语义控制过程（受控语义认知框架）支持有效选择与当前目标或上下文相关的语义表示的特定方面的能力。这种语义控制组件在语义失语症患者中受损，他们在左半球中风后出现多模态语义障碍，并且对语义任务的控制需求高度敏感。然而，关于这种控制缺陷如何与语义表示的各个方面相互作用，人们知之甚少。

宗旨

在这里，我们测试了语义特征的相关性是否会影响语义失语症患者在选择语义存储中的信息时对控制资源的需求。

方法和程序

参与者执行特征选择任务，要求他们指出三个特征中的哪一个与给定概念在语义上相关。

结果和结果

我们发现语义失语症患者对低相关性特征的损害更大，表明选择低相关性目标特征比高相关性目标特征需要更大的语义控制。

结论

我们的结果证实了选择概念知识方面的控制过程的必要性，当这些方面与任务相关时，这些方面仅在语义存储中被弱激活。因此，该研究强调语义认知来自控制和表征系统的相互作用。