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The Journal of Neuroscience, October 29, 2008, 28(44):11347-11353; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3039-08.2008

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Concepts Are More than Percepts: The Case of Action Verbs

Marina Bedny,^1,2 Alfonso Caramazza,^3,4 Emily Grossman,⁵ Alvaro Pascual-Leone,¹ and Rebecca Saxe²

¹Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, ²Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, ³Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, ⁴Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, 38068 Rovereto, Italy, and ⁵Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92697

Correspondence should be addressed to Marina Bedny, Bernson-Allen Center for Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, 330 Brookline Avenue, KS-158, Boston, MA 02215. Email: mbedny{at}bidmc.harvard.edu

Several regions of the posterior-lateral-temporal cortex (PLTC) are reliably recruited when participants read or listen to action verbs, relative to other word and nonword types. This PLTC activation is generally interpreted as reflecting the retrieval of visual-motion features of actions. This interpretation supports the broader theory, that concepts are comprised of sensory–motor features. We investigated an alternative interpretation of the same activations: PLTC activity for action verbs reflects the retrieval of modality-independent representations of event concepts, or the grammatical types associated with them, i.e., verbs. During a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan, participants made semantic-relatedness judgments on word pairs varying in amount of visual-motion information. Replicating previous results, several PLTC regions showed higher responses to words that describe actions versus objects. However, we found that these PLTC regions did not overlap with visual-motion regions. Moreover, their response was higher for verbs than nouns, regardless of visual-motion features. For example, the response of the PLTC is equally high to action verbs (e.g., to run) and mental verbs (e.g., to think), and equally low to animal nouns (e.g., the cat) and inanimate natural kind nouns (e.g., the rock). Thus, PLTC activity for action verbs might reflect the retrieval of event concepts, or the grammatical information associated with verbs. We conclude that concepts are abstracted away from sensory–motor experience and organized according to conceptual properties.

Key words: language; sensory–motor; temporal; concept; memory; visual motion

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Received July 1, 2008; revised Sept. 5, 2008; accepted Sept. 8, 2008.

Correspondence should be addressed to Marina Bedny, Bernson-Allen Center for Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, 330 Brookline Avenue, KS-158, Boston, MA 02215. Email: mbedny{at}bidmc.harvard.edu

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There is more to action words than verbs: The case of action nouns

Ana Maria Abreu, et al.

J. Neurosci. Online, 3 Mar 2009 [Full text]

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