Tong Jia-Qing, Binder Jeffrey R, Conant Lisa L, Mazurchuk Stephen, Anderson Andrew J, Fernandino Leonardo
Department of Neurology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA.
Department of Biophysics, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA.
bioRxiv. 2025 Aug 22:2025.08.22.671793. doi: 10.1101/2025.08.22.671793.
Events and objects are two fundamental ways in which humans conceptualize their experience of the world. Despite the significance of this distinction for human cognition, it remains unclear whether the neural representations of object and event concepts are categorically distinct or, instead, can be explained in terms of a shared representational code. We investigated this question by analyzing fMRI data acquired from human participants (males and females) while they rated their familiarity with the meanings of individual words (all nouns) denoting object and event concepts. Multivoxel pattern analyses indicated that both categories of lexical concepts are represented in overlapping fashion throughout the association cortex, even in the areas that showed the strongest selectivity for one or the other type in univariate contrasts. Crucially, in these areas, a feature-based model trained on neural responses to individual event concepts successfully decoded object concepts from their corresponding activation patterns (and vice versa), showing that these two categories share a common representational code. This code was effectively modeled by a set of experiential feature ratings, which also accounted for the mean activation differences between these two categories. These results indicate that neuroanatomical dissociations between events and objects emerge from quantitative differences in the cortical distribution of more fundamental features of experience. Characterizing this representational code is an important step in the development of theory-driven brain-computer interface technologies capable of decoding conceptual content directly from brain activity.
事件和物体是人类将自身对世界的体验概念化的两种基本方式。尽管这种区分对人类认知具有重要意义，但物体概念和事件概念的神经表征是绝对不同的，还是可以用共享的表征代码来解释，这一点仍不清楚。我们通过分析从人类参与者（男性和女性）身上获取的功能磁共振成像（fMRI）数据来研究这个问题，这些参与者在对表示物体和事件概念的单个单词（所有名词）的含义的熟悉程度进行评分时接受了扫描。多体素模式分析表明，这两类词汇概念在整个联合皮层中以重叠的方式呈现，即使在单变量对比中对某一种类型表现出最强选择性的区域也是如此。至关重要的是，在这些区域，基于对单个事件概念的神经反应训练的特征模型能够从相应的激活模式中成功解码物体概念（反之亦然），这表明这两类概念共享一个共同的表征代码。这一代码可以通过一组经验特征评分有效地建模，这些评分也解释了这两类概念之间的平均激活差异。这些结果表明，事件和物体之间的神经解剖学分离源于经验的更基本特征在皮层分布上的数量差异。表征这一代码是开发能够直接从大脑活动中解码概念内容的理论驱动型脑机接口技术的重要一步。
