CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, 100101, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
Brain Struct Funct. 2020 Apr;225(3):995-1008. doi: 10.1007/s00429-020-02052-3. Epub 2020 Mar 5.
Neuroimaging studies have indicated that a brain network distributed in the supramodal cortical regions of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes plays a central role in conceptual processing. The activation of this network is modulated by two orthogonal dimensions in conceptual processing-the semantic features of individual concepts and the meaningfulness of conceptual combinations-but it remains unclear how the network is functionally organized along these two dimensions. In this fMRI study, we focused on two specific factors, i.e. the social semantic richness of words and the semantic plausibility of word combinations, along the two dimensions. In literature, the distributions of the effects of the two factors are very similar, but have not been rigorously compared in one study. We orthogonally manipulated the two factors in a phrase comprehension task and found a clear dissociation between their effects. The combination of these results with our previous findings reveals three adjacently distributed subnetworks of the supramodal semantic network, associated with the sociality effect, imageability effect, and semantic plausibility effect, respectively. Further analysis of the resting-state functional connectivity data indicated that the functional dissociation among the three subnetworks is associated with their underlying intrinsic connectivity structures.
神经影像学研究表明，一个分布在前额、颞叶和顶叶的超模态皮质区域的大脑网络在概念处理中起着核心作用。这个网络的激活受到概念处理中两个正交维度的调节——单个概念的语义特征和概念组合的意义性——但目前尚不清楚该网络如何沿着这两个维度进行功能组织。在这项 fMRI 研究中，我们关注了两个特定因素，即词的社会语义丰富度和词组合的语义合理性，沿着这两个维度。在文献中，这两个因素的影响分布非常相似，但在一项研究中尚未进行严格比较。我们在一个短语理解任务中正交地操纵了这两个因素，发现它们的影响明显不同。将这些结果与我们之前的发现相结合，揭示了超模态语义网络的三个相邻分布的子网，分别与社会性效应、形象性效应和语义合理性效应相关。对静息态功能连接数据的进一步分析表明，三个子网之间的功能分离与其内在连接结构有关。
