ABSTRACT
Category-specific deficits are intriguing to a wide range of neuroscientists because they illustrate the high degree of cognitive and neuronal specialisation in the human brain. This chapter considers how functional neuroimaging might contribute to understanding the nature of this specialisation and how category specific deficits arise. The first and second sections describe the potential ways that neuroimaging can be used to assess, respectively, the underlying neuronal systems and cognitive models of category specificity. The third section reviews the current functional neuroimaging literature and its implications for cognitive models. Finally, the fourth section discusses future directions for addressing category specificity issues with neuroimaging.
Double dissociations in category-specific deficits suggest that different categories of items rely on anatomically dissociable neuronal systems that can be selectively damaged following brain injury. One way to identify the different anatomical systems is to link the site of brain damage to the lost functions. For instance, damage to the anterior temporal lobes has been associated with deficits identifying natural kinds of objects and left frontoparietal damage has been associated with deficits identifying man-made objects (for a review
