Influence of conceptual knowledge on visual object discrimination: insights from semantic dementia and MTL amnesia

Barense, M. D., Rogers, T. T., Bussey, T. J., Saksida, L. M. and Graham, Kim Samantha ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1512-7667 2010. Influence of conceptual knowledge on visual object discrimination: insights from semantic dementia and MTL amnesia. Cerebral Cortex 20 (11) , pp. 2568-2582. 10.1093/cercor/bhq004

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that the perirhinal cortex is involved in perception of complex objects with ambiguous features. Anterior regions of the temporal lobes, including the perirhinal cortex as well as lateral cortex, are also thought to play a critical role in semantic memory. To understand how semantic factors might contribute to perceptual discrimination of complex objects, we studied visual object discrimination in patients with semantic dementia (SD)—a neurodegenerative condition characterized by progressive deterioration of semantic knowledge and atrophy to anterior temporal lobes (including perirhinal cortex). In 3 experiments, we assessed discrimination of meaningful (e.g., familiar real-world objects) and novel (e.g., blobs) objects with varying feature ambiguity levels. In a fourth experiment, we compared SD patients with amnesic patients with nonprogressive medial temporal lobe (MTL) lesions and less impaired semantic memory. Across studies, patients with perirhinal damage were impaired at discriminating objects with a high, but not low, degree of feature ambiguity, consistent with previous work indicating a perceptual role for this structure. Stimulus meaningfulness, however, differentially influenced performance in SD patients compared with MTL amnesics, suggesting that perceptual representations of complex objects (dependent upon perirhinal cortex) interact with higher-order abstract conceptual representations, even for tasks with no overt semantic component.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology Systems Immunity Research Institute (SIURI)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Uncontrolled Keywords:	declarative memory; frontotemporal dementia; perception; perirhinal cortex; semantic memory
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	1047-3211
Last Modified:	20 Oct 2022 07:44
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/26209

Citation Data

Cited 54 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item