Semantic tiles or hub-and-spokes?

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2022.01.002

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 26, Issue 3, March 2022, Pages 189-190

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.01.002 Get rights and content

New results from Popham et al. generate ‘semantic maps’ from spoken narratives and movies that appear remarkably aligned near visual cortex. We consider whether such findings are consistent with the hub-and-spokes view of semantic representation or whether they require a rethinking of the cortical knowledge system.

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Declaration of interests

None declared by the authors.

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Semantic dementia: one window on the structure and organisation of semantic memory

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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The ease with which narratives are understood belies the complexity of the information being conveyed and the cognitive processes that support comprehension. The meanings of the words must be rapidly accessed and integrated with the reader's mental representation of the overarching, unfolding scenario. A broad, bilateral brain network is engaged by this process, but it is not clear how words that vary on specific semantic dimensions, such as ambiguity, emotion, or socialness, engage the semantic, semantic control, or social cognition systems. In the present study, data from 48 participants who listened to The Little Prince audiobook during MRI scanning were selected from the Le Petit Prince dataset. The lexical and semantic content within the narrative was quantified from the transcript words with factor scores capturing Word Length, Semantic Flexibility, Emotional Strength, and Social Impact. These scores, along with word quantity variables, were used to investigate where these predictors co-vary with activation across the brain. In contrast to studies of isolated word processing, large networks were found to co-vary with the lexical and semantic content within the narrative. An increase in semantic content engaged the ventral portion of ventrolateral ATL, consistent with its role as a semantic hub. Decreased semantic content engaged temporal pole and inferior parietal lobule, which may reflect semantic integration. The semantic control network was engaged by words with low Semantic Flexibility, perhaps due to the demand required to process infrequent, less semantically diverse language. Activation in ATL co-varied with an increase in Social Impact, which is consistent with the claim that social knowledge is housed within the neural architecture of the semantic system. These results suggest that current models of language processing may present an impoverished estimate of the neural systems that coordinate to support narrative comprehension, and, by extension, real-world language processing.
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Trends in Cognitive Sciences

SpotlightSemantic tiles or hub-and-spokes?

Section snippets

Declaration of interests

Neuron

Neuron

Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex

Nature

Visual and linguistic semantic representations are aligned at the border of human visual cortex

Nat. Neurosci.

Semantic dementia: one window on the structure and organisation of semantic memory

Spotlight
Semantic tiles or hub-and-spokes?