ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to describe some of the advances that have been made in the branch of cognitive neuroscience that focuses on the representation and organization of the kinds of object concepts that are typically expressed by nouns. Here at the outset, it is important to note that this area of inquiry is fraught with controversy (for reviews of several competing positions see Gainotti, 2006; Patterson et al., 2007; Taylor et al., 2007; Martin, 2007, 2009; Mahon & Caramazza, 2008, 2009; Kemmerer, 2010b; Binder & Desai, 2011; Kiefer & Pulvermüller, 2012; Meteyard et al., 2012; Jefferies, 2013). Because it would require
a whole separate book to do proper justice to all of the key theoretical and empirical issues that are at stake, we will restrict our attention to a few of the most salient themes. The first section focuses on the provocative proposal that the modality-specific aspects of object concepts-e.g., how the things we call apples typically look, taste, and smell, and how we typically interact with them-depend on the same modality-specific neural systems that subserve high-level perception and action. The second section then turns to the closely related hypothesis that the anatomically distributed sensory and motor features of object concepts are bound together and organized by an integrative system that resides in the anterior temporal lobes. Finally, the third section addresses the question of how the brain groups object concepts into higher-order categories or domains such as those mentioned above (i.e., animals, fruits/vegetables, tools/utensils, etc.).
