Semantic information in the human brain is organized into multiple networks, but the fine-grain relationships between them are poorly understood. In this study, we compared semantic maps obtained from two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments in the same participants: one that used silent movies as stimuli and another that used narrative stories. Movies evoked activity from a network of modality-specific, semantically selective areas in visual cortex. Stories evoked activity from another network of semantically selective areas immediately anterior to visual cortex. Remarkably, the pattern of semantic selectivity in these two distinct networks corresponded along the boundary of visual cortex: for visual categories represented posterior to the boundary, the same categories were represented linguistically on the anterior side. These results suggest that these two networks are smoothly joined to form one contiguous map.

人脑中的语义信息被组织成多个网络，但人们对它们之间的细粒度关系知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们比较了从同一参与者的两个功能磁共振成像实验中获得的语​​义图：一个使用无声电影作为刺激，另一个使用叙事故事。电影从视觉皮层中特定模态、语义选择性区域的网络中引发活动。故事从紧靠视觉皮层之前的另一个语义选择区域网络引发活动。值得注意的是，这两个不同网络中的语义选择性模式沿着视觉皮层的边界对应：对于边界后方表示的视觉类别，相同的类别在语言上表示在前侧。