The Perspective from Cognitive Neuroscience

This chapter provides a concise and selective summary of some major developments in the branch of cognitive neuroscience that focuses on concepts, with the goal of establishing a foundation for the neurobiological data covered in Part II. The first section reviews evidence that concrete concepts are grounded in modal systems for perception, action, and emotion, such that much of semantic processing involves the simulation of sensory, motor, and affective states, albeit in ways that can be flexibly modulated by factors like task, context, and individual experience. It also argues that transmodal systems are necessary to integrate the cortically distributed features of multimodal concepts, to transcend superficial criteria for categorization, and to form unitary representations that can easily be accessed and combined. The subsequent sections address the following topics: the increasingly popular notion of representational similarity spaces; the relatively neglected realm of grammatical semantics; and the provocative view that linguistic communication involves brain-to-brain coupling or alignment.