Category-Specific versus Category-General Semantic Impairment Induced by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Category-Specific versus Category-General Semantic Impairment Induced by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Semantic cognition permits us to bring meaning to our verbal and nonverbal experiences and to generate context- and time-appropriate behavior. It is core to language and nonverbal skilled behaviors and, when impaired after brain damage, it generates significant disability. A fundamental neuroscience question is, therefore, how does the brain code and generate semantic cognition? Historical and ...

Category specific semantic impairments.

We report a quantitative investigation of the visual identification and auditory comprehension deficits of 4 patients who had made a partial recovery from herpes simplex encephalitis. Clinical observations had suggested the selective impairment and selective preservation of certain categories of visual stimuli. In all 4 patients a significant discrepancy between their ability to identify inanim...

Premorbid expertise produces category-specific impairment in a domain-general semantic disorder.

For decades, category-specific semantic impairment - i.e., better comprehension of items from one semantic category than another - has been the driving force behind many claims about the organisation of conceptual knowledge in the brain. Double dissociations between patients with category-specific disorders are widely interpreted as showing that different conceptual domains are necessarily supp...

Category-specific effects in semantic memory: category-task interactions suggested by fMRI.

Much work has investigated the neural representation of specific categories of knowledge, but relatively scant attention has been paid in the cognitive neuroscience literature to the semantic processes that contribute to semantic memory. In this study, we monitored regional cortical activity with fMRI while healthy young adults evaluated visually displayed NATURAL KIND, ARTIFACT, and ABSTRACT n...

Factors underlying category-specific semantic deficits