Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, , Zochonis Building, Brunswick Street, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2013 Dec 9;369(1634):20120392. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0392. Print 2014.
Conceptual knowledge reflects our multi-modal 'semantic database'. As such, it brings meaning to all verbal and non-verbal stimuli, is the foundation for verbal and non-verbal expression and provides the basis for computing appropriate semantic generalizations. Multiple disciplines (e.g. philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and behavioural neurology) have striven to answer the questions of how concepts are formed, how they are represented in the brain and how they break down differentially in various neurological patient groups. A long-standing and prominent hypothesis is that concepts are distilled from our multi-modal verbal and non-verbal experience such that sensation in one modality (e.g. the smell of an apple) not only activates the intramodality long-term knowledge, but also reactivates the relevant intermodality information about that item (i.e. all the things you know about and can do with an apple). This multi-modal view of conceptualization fits with contemporary functional neuroimaging studies that observe systematic variation of activation across different modality-specific association regions dependent on the conceptual category or type of information. A second vein of interdisciplinary work argues, however, that even a smorgasbord of multi-modal features is insufficient to build coherent, generalizable concepts. Instead, an additional process or intermediate representation is required. Recent multidisciplinary work, which combines neuropsychology, neuroscience and computational models, offers evidence that conceptualization follows from a combination of modality-specific sources of information plus a transmodal 'hub' representational system that is supported primarily by regions within the anterior temporal lobe, bilaterally.
概念知识反映了我们多模态的“语义数据库”。因此，它赋予了所有言语和非言语刺激以意义，是言语和非言语表达的基础，并为计算适当的语义概括提供了基础。多个学科（例如哲学、认知科学、认知神经科学和行为神经科学）都致力于回答以下问题：概念是如何形成的，它们在大脑中是如何表示的，以及它们在各种神经患者群体中是如何不同地分解的。一个长期存在且突出的假设是，概念是从我们的多模态言语和非言语经验中提炼出来的，因此一种感觉（例如苹果的气味）不仅会激活该感觉的模态内长期知识，还会重新激活该物品的相关模态间信息（即你所知道的关于苹果的所有信息以及可以用苹果做的所有事情）。这种多模态的概念化观点与当代功能神经影像学研究一致，这些研究观察到不同模态特异性关联区域的激活随概念类别或信息类型而系统变化。然而，跨学科工作的另一个流派认为，即使是多种模态特征的大杂烩也不足以构建连贯的、可概括的概念。相反，需要额外的过程或中间表示。最近的多学科工作结合了神经心理学、神经科学和计算模型，为以下观点提供了证据，即概念化是由特定模态信息源与跨模态“中枢”表示系统相结合而来的，该系统主要由双侧前颞叶区域支持。
