ABSTRACT
For many years, psychologists have been fascinated by people whose behaviour deviates from the norm following brain injury. Over the past 20 years or so, patients’ performance on various tasks has served as constraints on theories of cognition and perception. As part of this research, there has been a great deal of interest in category-specific semantic deficits, whereby patients show differentially impaired knowledge of living things, such as zebras and carrots, versus non-living things, such as helicopters and pliers. The main reason for the intense interest in category-specific deficits has been their promise for providing insights into the organisation of semantic memory. To date, a number of theories have been proposed regarding the factors that underlie category-specific deficits, but there are currently unresolved debates concerning each of them. A major barrier to resolving these debates has been the lack of empirically derived quantitative estimates of these factors for large sets of living and non-living things. Therefore, the purpose of the research reported herein is to use a set of semantic feature production norms that includes 206 living and 343 non-living things to shed light on the factors that underlie category-specific deficits, both at the level of the broad living-non-living distinction, and for the categories within those domains.
