Cognitive neuroscience research on conceptual knowledge often is discussed with respect to “embodiment” or “grounding.” We tried to disentangle at least three distinct claims made using these terms. One of these, the view that concepts are entirely...
The placement and development of the visual word form area (VWFA) have commonly been assumed to depend, in part, on its connections with language regions. In this study, we specifically examined the effects of auditory speech experience deprivation in...
Reading an action verb elicits the retrieval of its associated body movements as well as its typical goal—the outcome to which it is directed. Two fMRI experiments are reported in which retrieval of goal attributes was isolated from retrieval of motoric...
Classical animal visual deprivation studies and human neuroimaging studies have shown that visual experience plays a critical role in shaping the functionality and connectivity of the visual cortex. Interestingly, recent studies have additionally reported...
Conceptual processing of verbs consistently recruits the left pos- terior middle temporal gyrus (lpMTG). The left precentral motor cortex also responds to verbs, with higher activity for action than nonaction verbs. The early timing of this effect has...
In congenitally blind individuals, many regions of the brain that are typically heavily involved in visual processing are recruited for a variety of nonvisual sensory and cognitive tasks (Rauschecker 1995; Pascual-Leone et al. 2005). This phenomenon—cross...
Verbs and nouns are fundamental units of language, but their neural instantiation remains poorly understood. Neuro- psychological research has shown that nouns and verbs can be damaged independently of each other, and neuroimaging re- search has found...
According to recent research on language comprehension, the semantic features of a text are not the only determinants of whether incoming information is understood as consistent. Listeners' pre-existing affective states play a crucial role as well. The...
Every day, we interact with people synchronously, immediately understand what they are doing, and easily infer their mental state and the likely outcome of their actions from their kinematics. According to various motor simulation theories of perception...
To grasp an object, we need to move the arm toward it and assume the appropriate hand configuration. While previous studies suggested dorsomedial and dorsolateral pathways in the brain specialized respectively for the transport and grip components, more...
This research studies the neural systems underlying two integration processes that take place during natural discourse comprehension: consistency evaluation and passive comprehension. Evaluation was operationalized with a consistency judgment task and...
Knowledge of function is critical for selecting objects to meet action goals, even when the affordances of those objects are not mechanical—for instance, both a painting and a vase can decorate a room. To identify neural representations of such abstract...
