ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2018
Doctor, Teacher, and Stethoscope: Neural Representation of Different Types of Semantic Relations.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Decoding and Characterizing the Intracranial Representation of Semantic Information.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Neural underpinnings of thematic and taxonomic processing in indirect semantic priming: evidence from the N400 and frontal negativity.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- The role of vocabulary concreteness in modulating embodied semantic representations in learners of Chinese as a foreign language.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging of taxonomic and thematic processing of abstract and concrete word pairs.Journal of neuropsychology · 2025Article
- Semantic similarity is not emotional: No effect of similarity defined by valence, arousal, and dominance on short-term ordered recall.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Neural correlates of social and thematic semantics in autistic and non-autistic adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural encoding of semantic structures during sentence production.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Long-term motor training enhances functional connectivity between semantic and motor regions in an effector-specific manner: evidence from elite female football athletes.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- The neural basis of naturalistic semantic and social cognition.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Representation of event and object concepts in ventral anterior temporal lobe and angular gyrus.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Agent-Object Relationships in Level-2 Visual Perspective Taking: An Eye-Tracking Study.Journal of cognition · 2024Article
- A Chinese verb semantic feature dataset (CVFD).Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Experientially-grounded and distributional semantic vectors uncover dissociable representations of conceptual categories.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2024Article
- Unraveling lexical semantics in the brain: Comparing internal, external, and hybrid language models.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- The language network is not engaged in object categorization.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Effects on the Neural Substrate of Conceptual Representations.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Similar object shape representation encoded in the inferolateral occipitotemporal cortex of sighted and early blind people.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Novel objects with causal event schemas elicit selective responses in tool- and hand-selective lateral occipitotemporal cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Concepts can be related in many ways. They can belong to the same taxonomic category (e.g., "doctor" and "teacher," both in the category of people) or be associated with the same event context (e.g., "doctor" and "stethoscope," both associated with medical scenarios). How are these two major types of semantic relations coded in the brain? We constructed stimuli from three taxonomic categories (people, manmade objects, and locations) and three thematic categories (school, medicine, and sports) and investigated the neural representations of these two dimensions using representational similarity analyses in human participants (10 men and nine women). In specific regions of interest, the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) and the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), we found that, whereas both areas had significant effects of taxonomic information, the taxonomic relations had stronger effects in the ATL than in the TPJ ("doctor" and "teacher" closer in ATL neural activity), with the reverse being true for thematic relations ("doctor" and "stethoscope" closer in TPJ neural activity). A whole-brain searchlight analysis revealed that widely distributed regions, mainly in the left hemisphere, represented the taxonomic dimension. Interestingly, the significant effects of the thematic relations were only observed after the taxonomic differences were controlled for in the left TPJ, the right superior lateral occipital cortex, and other frontal, temporal, and parietal regions. In summary, taxonomic grouping is a primary organizational dimension across distributed brain regions, with thematic grouping further embedded within such taxonomic structures.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.