Author : Matthew Weber
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781109137682
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (376 download)
Book Synopsis Mapping Conceptual Knowledge in the Human Brain by : Matthew Weber
Download or read book Mapping Conceptual Knowledge in the Human Brain written by Matthew Weber and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We here examine the relationship between similarity and inductive inference, as well as the relationship between those types of judgments and neural representations of knowledge. We first present a model of category-based induction that estimates the probabilities of conditional sentences from the similarities and probabilities that govern their constituents (Chapter 2). We then present data from a published experiment showing that similarity information is retrievable from patterns of neural activity collected when participants are simply judging the category membership of images: Simple vectorwise metrics and measures derived from machine learning can extract similarities from the lateral occipital cortex that correlate strongly with similarity judgment (Chapter 3). Finally, we present results using new fMRI data that replicate our ability to extract similarity information from lateral occipital as well as posterior temporal cortices (BA 37) and show that those similarities, when supplied to our model, yield excellent predictions of probability rated for conditional sentences. Information-based analyses pick out regions strongly overlapping the lateral occipital and posterior temporal cortices as highly informative about conditional probability (Chapter 4). Curiously, however, rated similarity does not predict conditional probability when supplied to our model; this matter is discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall, our results support the storage of semantic knowledge in distributed patterns of activity over sensory areas and the usefulness of similarity derived from simple operations on that knowledge as an input to inductive judgment.