Social and emotion dimensional organizations in the abstract semantic space: the neuropsychological evidence.

ABSTRACT: An essential aspect of human cognition is supported by a rich reservoir of abstract concepts without tangible external referents (e.g., "honor", "relationship", "direction"). While decades of research showed that the neural organization of conceptual knowledge referring to concrete words respects domains of evolutionary salience and sensorimotor attributes, the organization principles of abstract word meanings are poorly understood. Here, we provide neuropsychological evidence for a domain (sociality) and attribute (emotion) structure in abstract word processing. Testing 34 brain-damaged patients on a word-semantic judgment task, we observed double dissociations between social and nonsocial words and a single dissociation of sparing of emotional (relative to non-emotional) words. The lesio

SUBMITTER: Wang X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8651696 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature