Category Specificity In Brain And Mind

Some of the most fascinating deficits in neuropsychology concern the failure to recognise common objects from one semantic category, such as living things, when there is no such difficulty with objects from another, such as non-living things. Over the past twenty years, numerous cases of these 'category specific' recognition and naming problems have been documented and several competing theories have been developed to account for the patients' disorders. Category Specificity in Brain and Mind draws together the neuropsychological literature on category-specific impairments, with research on how children develop knowledge about different categories, functional brain imaging work and computational models of object recognition and semantic memory. The chapters are written by internationally leading psychologists and neuroscientists and the result is a review of the most up-to-date thinking on how knowledge about different categories is acquired and organized in the mind, and where it is represented in the human brain. The text will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and researchers in the field of category specificity and a rich source of information for neuropsychologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers.

From a neuropsychological perspective, our understanding about how knowledge is organised in the human brain has emerged largely from the study of so-called 'category-specific' deficits in neurological patients. Category-specificity is, in very broad terms, the relative loss of cognitive performance in one domain of knowledge over another. The most frequently reported and discussed pattern concerns a dissociation between knowledge about nonliving things (e.g. tools) and living things (e.g. animals). Most reports of categorical impairment have emerged from case studies of patients with pathologies such as herpes simplex encephalitis, strokes or head injuries and the dementias (especially Alzheimer's disease). These category specific effects have been fundamental in forming theories and models about the organisation and modular structure of semantic knowledge in the brain. The different chapters of this book illustrate a broad range of interesting and strongly debated issues arising from the category-specific literature, all of them fundamental to cognitive neuropsychology. This book, written by researchers who during the last decade have intensively researched this intriguing field, present an up-to-date exploration of major neuropsychological issues that have general implications beyond the field of category knowledge e.g. issues such as modularity, computational modelling of cognitive processing, gender-related asymmetries and functional imaging.

A collection of essays introducing the reader to `domain-specificity'.

The relation between mind and brain can never be understood by science until the nature of consciousness and self-consciousness is clearly perceived as specific system-properties. In this volume the author tackles this problem in a rigorous analysis which begins with the general dynamics of living systems and leads the reader step-by-step towards firm conclusions about the physical processes of consciousness and the main categories of mental events. Finally the author moves from the cognitive to the affective, and proceeds to interpret a number of uniquely human sensibilities in the light of the general biological perspective he has established.

Category-specific knowledge disorders are among the most intriguing and perplexing syndromes in cognitive neuropsychology. The past decade has witnessed increased interest in these disorders, due largely to a heightened appreciation of the profound implications that an understanding of concept representation has for such diverse topics as object recognition, the organisation of the lexicon, and storage of long-term memories. Until recently, information about the representation of concepts was limited to findings from patients with brain injury and disease. This state of affairs has now changed with the advent and wide-spread availability of functional imaging for studying cognition in the normal human brain. The purpose of this special issue is to provide a forum for new findings and critical, theoretical analyses of existing data from patient and functional brain imaging studies. The contributions, all from major investigators in the field, range from studies of specific object categories such as animals, tools, fruit and vegetables, and faces, to the more general domains of number processing, social interaction, and mechanical knowledge. A unifying theme of these papers is the extent to which the findings can be best understood within the context of models that posit an innate, domain-specific organisation, those that appeal to an organisation by sensory- and motor-based features and properties, and those that propose an undifferentiated, distributed neural organisation.

This volume explores the scientific frontiers and leading edges of research across the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, history, business, education, geography, law, and psychiatry, as well as the newer, more specialized areas of artificial intelligence, child development, cognitive science, communications, demography, linguistics, and management and decision science. It includes recommendations concerning new resources, facilities, and programs that may be needed over the next several years to ensure rapid progress and provide a high level of returns to basic research.

A mechanistic theory of the representation and use of semantic knowledge that uses distributed connectionist networks as a starting point for a psychological theory of semantic cognition.

The Oxford Handbook of Event-Related Potential Components provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of the major ERP components. It covers components related to multiple research domains, including perception, cognition, emotion, neurological and psychiatric disorders, and lifespan development.