Universite catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2003 May 1;20(3):373-400. doi: 10.1080/02643290244000329.
In this paper, we report the case of RS, a brain-damaged patient presenting with a disproportionate conceptual impairment for fruit and vegetables in comparison to animals and artefacts. We argue that such a finer-grained category-specific deficit than the living/nonliving dichotomy provides a source of critical evidence for assessing current alternative theories of conceptual organisation in the brain. The case study was designed to evaluate distinct expectations derived from the categorical and the knowledge-specific accounts for category-specific semantic deficits. In particular, the integrity of object-colour knowledge has been assessed in order to determine whether the patient's deficit for fruit and vegetables was associated with a deficit for that kind of knowledge, which has been claimed to be highly diagnostic for fruit and vegetables. The results showed that the patient's pattern of performance is consistent with theories assuming a topographical category-like organisation of conceptual knowledge in the brain.
本文报告了 RS 的病例，他是一名脑损伤患者，与动物和人工制品相比，对水果和蔬菜的概念理解存在不成比例的损伤。我们认为，与“生物/非生物”二分法相比，这种更精细的类别特异性缺陷为评估大脑中当前替代概念组织理论提供了关键证据。该病例研究旨在评估源自类别和知识特异性的不同假设，以解释类别特异性语义缺陷。特别是，评估了物体颜色知识的完整性，以确定患者对水果和蔬菜的缺陷是否与该类知识的缺陷有关，该类知识被认为对水果和蔬菜具有高度诊断价值。结果表明，患者的表现模式与假设大脑中概念知识具有拓扑类别样组织的理论一致。
