Yizhen Zhang, Kuan Han, Robert Worth, Zhongming Liu. Connecting Concepts in the Brain: Mapping Cortical Representations of Semantic Relations. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/649939

In the brain, the semantic system is thought to store concepts. However, little is known about how it connects different concepts and infers semantic relations. To address this question, we collected hours of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from human subjects listening to natural stories. We developed a predictive model of the voxel-wise response, and further applied it to thousands of new words. We found that both semantic categories and relations were represented by spatially overlapping cortical networks, instead of anatomically segregated regions. Importantly, many such semantic relations that reflected conceptual progression from concreteness to abstractness were represented by a similar cortical pattern of anti-correlation between the default mode network and the frontoparietal attention network. Our results suggest that the human brain represents a continuous semantic space and uses distributed networks to encode not only concepts but also relationships between concepts. In particular, the default mode network plays a central role in semantic processing for abstraction of concepts across various domains.

For further info, please read the paper Zhang et al. 2019

Yizhen Zhang, Kuan Han, Robert Worth, Zhongming Liu. Connecting Concepts in the Brain: Mapping Cortical Representations of Semantic Relations. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/649939