Brain, Vol. 122, No. 5, 943-962,
May 1999
© 1999 Oxford University Press
A functional neuroimaging study of the variables that generate category-specific object processing differences
Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, Institute of Neurology, London, UK
Correspondence to:
Dr Cathy Price, Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, 12 Queen Square, London WCIN 3BG, UK E-mail: cprice{at}fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk
Brain damage can cause remarkably selective deficits in processing specific categories of objects, indicating the high degree of functional segregation within the brain. The neuroimaging study presented here investigates differences in the neural activity associated with two categories of natural objects (animals and fruit) and two categories of man-made objects (vehicles and tools). Stimuli were outline drawings and the tasks were naming and word–picture matching. For man-made objects, the only category-specific effect was in the left posterior middle temporal cortex, which was most active for drawings of tools, as previously reported. For natural objects, drawings of animals and fruit (relative to drawings of man-made objects) enhanced activity in bilateral anterior temporal and right posterior middle temporal cortices. Critically, these effects with natural objects were not observed when the stimuli were coloured appropriately to facilitate identification. Furthermore, activation in the same right hemisphere areas was also observed for viewing and matching unfamiliar non-objects relative to naming and matching man-made objects. These results indicate that, in the right hemisphere, differences between processing natural relative to man-made objects overlap with the effects of increasing demands on object identification. In the left hemisphere, the effects are more consistent with functional specialization within the semantic system. We discuss (i) how category-specific differences can emerge for multiple reasons and (ii) the implications of these effects on the interpretation of functional imaging data and patients with category-specific deficits.
category specificity; object identification; temporal lobe; functional neuroimaging
AC = anterior commissure; BA = Brodmann area; PC = posterior commissure; rCBF = regional cerebral blood flow
1 The anterior temporal cortex is a region rarely reported in functional neuroimaging studies. This is because (i) many previous PET studies have used cameras with a limited field of view, requiring an a priori decision of which areas to scan and (ii) use of image processing that excludes data >28 mm below the intercommissural line; with smoothing, this results in loss of signal 20 mm below.
2 In the reverse contrast (colour relative to black and white), activation was demonstrated in the brainstem (x = –8, y = –32, z = –36; Z-score = 4.4). This activation may relate to enhanced arousal (e.g. see Steriade, 1996); since this contrast is not the focus of our study, it will be discussed no further. Although comparisons of colour relative to black and white objects did not activate V4, previous studies reporting V4 activation in response to coloured stimuli have only done so in the context of transient on/off presentation for each stimulus, where stimuli were alternated at a rate of 1 Hz with a plain background (McKeefry and Zeki, 1997).
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