Department of Humanities and Life Sciences, Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS, Palazzo del Broletto, Piazza della Vittoria 15, Pavia, 27100, Italy.
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Istituti Clinici Scientifici Maugeri IRCCS, Pavia, 27100, Italy.
Brain Imaging Behav. 2021 Aug;15(4):1912-1921. doi: 10.1007/s11682-020-00384-6.
The possible uniqueness of social stimuli constitutes a key topic for cognitive neuroscience. Growing evidence highlights graded contributions to their semantic processing by the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), where the omni-category response displayed by its ventrolateral sector might reflect the integration of information relayed from other regions. Among these, the superior polar ATL was specifically associated with representing social concepts. However, most previous studies neglected the close relationship between social and emotional semantic features, which might confound interpreting the degree of overlap vs. specificity of social and emotional conceptual processing. We addressed this issue via two activation-likelihood-estimation meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies reporting brain structures associated with processing social or emotional concepts. Alongside a common involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, we found social and emotional concepts to be specifically associated with lateral temporal areas (including the superior polar ATL) and the amygdala, respectively. These results support the specialization of distinct sectors of the fronto-temporo-limbic circuitry for processing social vs. emotional concepts, and the integration of their output in medial prefrontal regions underlying the regulation of social behavior. These results pave the way for further studies addressing the neural bases of conceptual knowledge, its impairment after fronto-temporal brain damage, and the effect of rehabilitative interventions targeting its main functional modules.
社会刺激的可能独特性是认知神经科学的一个关键主题。越来越多的证据强调了前颞叶（ATL）对其腹侧区域的全类别反应在语义处理中的分级贡献，这可能反映了来自其他区域的信息的整合。其中，ATL 的上极区域特别与社会概念的表示有关。然而，大多数先前的研究忽视了社会和情感语义特征之间的密切关系，这可能会混淆对社会和情感概念处理的重叠程度和特异性的解释。我们通过对报告与处理社会或情感概念相关的大脑结构的神经影像学研究进行的两次激活似然估计荟萃分析来解决这个问题。除了腹内侧前额叶皮层的共同参与外，我们发现社会和情感概念分别与外侧颞区（包括 ATL 的上极）和杏仁核有特定的关联。这些结果支持了特定的额颞叶边缘电路区域用于处理社会和情感概念的专业化，以及它们的输出在调节社会行为的内侧前额叶区域中的整合。这些结果为进一步研究概念知识的神经基础、额颞叶脑损伤后的损害以及针对其主要功能模块的康复干预措施的效果铺平了道路。
