Abstract
AN intriguing and puzzling consequence of damage to the human brain is selective loss of knowledge about a specific category of objects. One patient may be unable to identify or name living things1–3, whereas another may have selective difficulty identifying man-made objects4–6. To investigate the neural correlates of this remarkable dissociation, we used positron emission tomography to map regions of the normal brain that are associated with naming animals and tools. We found that naming pictures of animals and tools was associated with bilateral activation of the ventral temporal lobes and Broca's area. In addition, naming animals selectively activated the left medial occipital lobe—a region involved in the earliest stages of visual processing. In contrast, naming tools selectively activated a left premotor area also activated by imagined hand movements7, and an area in the left middle temporal gyrus also activated by the generation of action words8–10. Thus the brain regions active during object identification are dependent, in part, on the intrinsic properties of the object presented.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Warrington, E. K. & Shallice, T. Brain 107, 829–854 (1984).
Silveri, M. C. & Gainotti, G. Cog. Neuropsychol. 5, 677–709 (1988).
Sheridan, J. & Humphreys, G. W. Cog. Neuropsychol. 10, 143–184 (1993).
Warrington, E. K. & McCarthy, R. Brain 106, 859–878 (1983).
Warrington, E. K. & McCarthy, R. Brain 110, 1273–1296 (1987).
Sacchett, C. & Humphreys, G. W. Cog. Neuropsychol. 9, 73–86 (1992).
Decety, J. et al. Nature 371, 600–602 (1994).
Wise, R. et al. Brain 114, 1803–1817 (1991).
Raichle, M. E. et al. Cereb. Cortex 4, 8–26 (1994).
Martin, A. et al. Science 270, 102–105 (1995).
Snodgrass, J. G. & Vanderwart, M. J. exp. Psychol.: Hum. Learn. Mem. 6, 174–215 (1980).
Kroll, J. F. & Potter, M. C. J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav. 23, 39–66 (1984).
Ungerleider, L. G. & Mishkin, M. in Analysis of Visual Behavior (eds Ingle, D. J., Goodale, M. A. & Mansfield, R. J. W.) 549–586 (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982).
Damasio, A. R. Cognition 33, 25–62 (1989).
Farah, M. J. Trends Neurosci. 12, 395–399 (1989).
Kosslyn, S. M. et al. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 5, 263–287 (1993).
Corbetta, M., Miezin, F. M., Dobmeyer, S., Shulman, G. L. & Petersen, S. Science 248, 1556–1559 (1990).
Zeki, S. et al. J. Neurosci. 11, 641–649 (1991).
Saffran, E. M. & Schwartz, M. F. in Attention and Performance XV (eds Umilta, C. & Moscovitch, M.) 507–536 (MIT Press, MA, 1994).
Glaser, W. R. Cognition 42, 61–105 (1992).
Humphreys, G. W., Riddoch, M. J. & Quinlan, P. T. Cog. Neuropsychol. 5, 67–103 (1988).
Tulving, E., Markowitsch, Kapur, S., Habib, R. & Houle, S. NeuroReport 5, 2525–2528 (1994).
Talairach, J. & Tournoux, P. Co-planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain (Thieme, New York, 1988).
Friston, K. J. et al. J. cereb. Blood Flow Metab. 10, 458–466 (1990).
Friston, K. J. et al. J. cereb. Blood Flow Metab. 9, 690–699 (1991).
Friston, K. J., Frith, C. D., Liddle, P. F. & Frackowiack, R. S. J. J. comput. assist. Tomogr. 15, 634–639 (1991).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Martin, A., Wiggs, C., Ungerleider, L. et al. Neural correlates of category-specific knowledge. Nature 379, 649–652 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1038/379649a0
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/379649a0
- Springer Nature Limited
This article is cited by
-
Brain correlates of action word memory revealed by fMRI
Scientific Reports (2022)
-
A network linking scene perception and spatial memory systems in posterior cerebral cortex
Nature Communications (2021)
-
Control over task conflict in the stroop and affordances tasks: an individual differences study
Psychological Research (2021)
-
Using the force: STEM knowledge and experience construct shared neural representations of engineering concepts
npj Science of Learning (2020)
-
Extensive childhood experience with Pokémon suggests eccentricity drives organization of visual cortex
Nature Human Behaviour (2019)