ArticleeLife2021
Evidence for a deep, distributed and dynamic code for animacy in human ventral anterior temporal cortex.
Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Decoding and Characterizing the Intracranial Representation of Semantic Information.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Frontotemporal network interactions causally support rapid concreteness judgments during reading.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation enhances semantic memory by modulating brain morphology, neurochemistry and neural dynamics.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Controlled Semantic Cognition: Precision Recordings Converge With in Silico Experiments to Reveal the Inner Workings of the Anterior Temporal Lobe Hub.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Review
- Multi-voxel pattern analysis of face and word encoding fMRI in people with temporal lobe epilepsy and healthy individuals.Epilepsy & behavior : E&B · 2025Article
- Article
- Using drawings and deep neural networks to characterize the building blocks of human visual similarity.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Mapping the task-general and task-specific neural correlates of speech production: Meta-analysis and fMRI direct comparisons of category fluency and picture naming.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- A computational deep learning investigation of animacy perception in the human brain.Communications biology · 2024Article
- The impact of bilateral versus unilateral anterior temporal lobe damage on face recognition, person knowledge and semantic memory.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- A neuroanatomical and cognitive model of impaired social behaviour in frontotemporal dementia.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2024Review
- Decoding Semantics from Dynamic Brain Activation Patterns: From Trials to Task in EEG/MEG Source Space.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Harmonic memory signals in the human cerebral cortex induced by semantic relatedness of words.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
- Representation of event and object concepts in ventral anterior temporal lobe and angular gyrus.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Representational similarity learning reveals a graded multidimensional semantic space in the human anterior temporal cortex.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Social-semantic knowledge in frontotemporal dementia and after anterior temporal lobe resection.Brain communications · 2024Article
- Animacy processing by distributed and interconnected networks in the temporal cortex of monkeys.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- The left posterior angular gyrus is engaged by autobiographical recall not object-semantics, or event-semantics: Evidence from contrastive propositional speech production.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Animacy Processing in Autism: Event-Related Potentials Reflect Social Functioning Skills.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- The architecture of abnormal reward behaviour in dementia: multimodal hedonic phenotypes and brain substrate.Brain communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
How does the human brain encode semantic information about objects? This paper reconciles two seemingly contradictory views. The first proposes that local neural populations independently encode semantic features; the second, that semantic representations arise as a dynamic distributed code that changes radically with stimulus processing. Combining simulations with a well-known neural network model of semantic memory, multivariate pattern classification, and human electrocorticography, we find that both views are partially correct: information about the animacy of a depicted stimulus is distributed across ventral temporal cortex in a dynamic code possessing feature-like elements posteriorly but with elements that change rapidly and nonlinearly in anterior regions. This pattern is consistent with the view that anterior temporal lobes serve as a deep cross-modal 'hub' in an interactive semantic network, and more generally suggests that tertiary association cortices may adopt dynamic distributed codes difficult to detect with common brain imaging methods.
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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.