ABSTRACT
Much of contemporary cognitive neuroscience is concerned with what has been called the “functional architecture” of cognition. What are the most meaningful large-scale groupings of the billions of neurons that underlie human intelligence, for the purposes of understanding such psychological processes as perception, memory, and language? In the field of semantic memory research, this issue has been central. Cognitive neuroscientists have considered a number of alternative subdivisions of semantic knowledge as it is implemented in the brain, including modality-specific components (e.g., Warrington & Shallice, 1984), attribute-specific components (e.g., Martin, 1998), and category-specific or meaning-specific components (e.g., Caramazza &, Shelton, 1998). The vigorous testing and refinement of alternative hypotheses continues, as many of the articles in this Special Issue attest.
