Brambati S M, Myers D, Wilson A, Rankin K P, Allison S C, Rosen H J, Miller B L, Gorno-Tempini M L
University of California-San Francisco, USA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2006 Oct;18(10):1644-53. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2006.18.10.1644.
Neuropsychological studies suggest that knowledge about living and nonliving objects is processed in separate brain regions. However, lesion and functional neuroimaging studies have implicated different areas. To address this issue, we used voxel-based morphometry to correlate accuracy in naming line drawings of living and nonliving objects with gray matter volumes in 152 patients with various neurodegenerative diseases. The results showed a significant positive correlation between gray matter volumes in bilateral temporal cortices and total naming accuracy regardless of category. Naming scores for living stimuli correlated with gray matter volume in the medial portion of the right anterior temporal pole, whereas naming accuracy for familiarity-matched nonliving items correlated with the volume of the left posterior middle temporal gyrus. A previous behavioral study showed that the living stimuli used here also had in common the characteristic that they were defined by shared sensory semantic features, whereas items in the nonliving group were defined by their action-related semantic features. We propose that the anatomical segregation of living and nonliving categories is the result of their defining semantic features and the distinct neural subsystems used to process them.
神经心理学研究表明，关于有生命和无生命物体的知识在大脑的不同区域进行处理。然而，病变和功能性神经影像学研究涉及的区域有所不同。为了解决这个问题，我们使用基于体素的形态测量法，将152例患有各种神经退行性疾病的患者对有生命和无生命物体线条图的命名准确性与灰质体积进行关联。结果显示，无论类别如何，双侧颞叶皮质的灰质体积与总命名准确性之间存在显著正相关。有生命刺激的命名分数与右前颞极内侧部分的灰质体积相关，而熟悉度匹配的无生命物品的命名准确性与左后颞中回的体积相关。先前的一项行为研究表明，这里使用的有生命刺激也具有共同特征，即它们由共享的感觉语义特征定义，而非生命组中的物品由其与动作相关的语义特征定义。我们提出，有生命和无生命类别的解剖学分离是其定义语义特征以及用于处理它们的不同神经子系统的结果。
