Distinctive semantic features in the healthy adult brain

The role of semantic features, which are distinctive (e.g., a zebra’s stripes) or shared (e.g. has four legs) for accessing a concept, has been studied in detail in early neurodegenerative disease such as semantic dementia (SD). However, potential neural underpinnings of such processing have not been studied in healthy adults. The current study examines neural activation patterns using fMRI while participants completed a feature verification task, in which they identified shared or distinctive semantic features for a set of natural kinds and man-made artifacts. The results showed that the anterior temporal lobe bilaterally is an important area for processing distinctive features, and that this effect is stronger within natural kinds than man-made artifacts. These findings provide converging evidence from healthy adults that is consistent with SD research, and support a model of semantic memory in which patterns of specificity of semantic information can partially explain differences in neural activation between categories.