Category-Related Brain Activation to Represent Semantic Organization

Abstract

Background: Categorization is one of the basic cognitive skills in human beings. In fact, it can organize knowledge and arrange human behavior. Objectives: The present study deals with the organization of conceptual knowledge by investigating and studying the ways in which different semantic domains are categorized. Materials and Methods: In the present study, event-related potentials (ERPs) have been recorded from 12 healthy right-handed male university students, who performed a semantic judgment task using 100 animal and tool words. Results: The interesting results of this study show a significant difference between both conditions in all time-windows, with more negativity for the tool category. Also, more negativity for both conditions is noticed when moving from anterior to posterior regions. Conclusions: These results are in accordance with findings of previous studies in this field and may be explained on the basis of the feature-based account of semantic knowledge organization.