Center for Neuropsychological Research, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli Rome, Italy ; Department of Clinical and Behavioral Neurology, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2012 Oct 29;3:430. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00430. eCollection 2012.
(a) the relationships between perceptual and conceptual activities and (b) the format and neuro-anatomical substrates of concepts. Some authors maintain that concepts are represented in the brain in a propositional, abstract way, which is totally unrelated to the sensory-motor functions of the brain. Other authors argue that concepts are represented in the same format in which they are constructed by the sensory-motor system and can be considered as activity patterns distributed across different perceptual and motor domains. The present paper examines two groups of investigations that support the second view. Particular attention is given to the role of body movements and somatosensory inputs in the representation of artifacts and, respectively, of visual and other perceptual sources of knowledge in the construction of biological categories. The first group of studies aimed to assess the weight of various kinds of information in the representation of different conceptual categories by asking normal subjects to subjectively evaluate the role of various perceptual, motor, and encyclopedic sources of knowledge in the construction of different semantic categories. The second group of studies investigated the neuro-anatomical correlates of various types of categorical disorders. These last investigations showed that the cortical areas damaged in patients with a disorder selectively affecting a given category have a critical role in processing the information that has contributed most to constructing the affected category. Both lines of research suggest that body movements and somatosensory information have a major role in the representation of actions and artifacts mainly known through manipulations and other actions, whereas visual and other perceptual information has a dominant role in the representation of animals and other living things.
(a)感知和概念活动之间的关系，以及 (b)概念的形式和神经解剖学基础。一些作者认为，概念在大脑中以命题、抽象的方式呈现，与大脑的感觉运动功能完全无关。另一些作者则认为，概念是以与感觉运动系统构建它们相同的格式呈现的，可以被视为分布在不同感觉和运动领域的活动模式。本文考察了支持第二种观点的两组研究。特别关注身体运动和躯体感觉输入在人工制品的表示中的作用，以及在生物类别构建中视觉和其他感知来源知识的表示中的作用。第一组研究旨在通过要求正常受试者主观评估各种感觉、运动和百科全书知识来源在构建不同语义类别中的作用，来评估不同概念类别表示中各种信息的权重。第二组研究调查了各种类型的类别障碍的神经解剖学相关性。这些最后的研究表明，在选择性影响特定类别的障碍患者中受损的皮质区域在处理对构建受影响类别贡献最大的信息方面起着关键作用。这两条研究线索都表明，身体运动和躯体感觉信息在主要通过操作和其他动作来了解的动作和人工制品的表示中起着重要作用，而视觉和其他感知信息在动物和其他生物的表示中起着主导作用。
