Genetic and environmental influences on the organisation of semantic memory in the brain: Is "living things" an innate category?
Genetic and environmental influences on the organisation of semantic memory in the brain: Is "living things" an innate category?
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DOI：
10.1080/02643290244000293
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发表时间：
2003-05-01
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Rabinowitz, C
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Farah, MJ;Rabinowitz, C
语义记忆的组织成独立的可损伤或可想象的成分必须由遗传和环境因素的某种组合来决定。对于这两个因素在建立语义记忆的功能结构中的相对作用，我们知之甚少。通过评估一个在新生儿时期遭受脑损伤的个体的语义记忆障碍，有可能为产后经历的贡献设定一个上限。本病例研究表明，在大约1日龄的大脑后动脉梗死后，对“生物”的知识出现了深刻而持久的损害。这里报告的两个实验的设计使我们能够从范围和选择性方面描述受试者的语义记忆障碍。这种损伤既影响对生物图片的命名，也影响对生物语言信息的检索。这不能用生物和非生物知识检索难度的差异来解释，因为在每个实验中，生物和非生物项目的难度是相等的。当对生物和非生物的视觉和非视觉信息分别进行查询时，生物信息和非生物信息均出现损伤，而非生物信息和非生物信息均不出现损伤。由于这种损伤是由于过早的脑损伤导致的，经验不足以对语义记忆的组织做出贡献，因此本案例研究支持了语义记忆中活体和非活体区别的遗传基础。
The organisation of semantic memory into separately lesionable or imageable components must be determined by some combination of genetic and environmental factors. Little is known about the relative contributions of these two factors in establishing the functional architecture of semantic memory. By assessing the semantic memory impairment of an individual who sustained brain damage as a newborn, it is possible to place an upper bound on the contribution of post-natal experience. The present case study demonstrates a profound and enduring impairment in knowledge of "living things" following posterior cerebral artery infarctions at approximately 1 day of age. The design of the two experiments reported here allows us to characterise the subject's semantic memory impairment in terms of its scope and selectivity. The impairment affects both the naming of pictures of living things and the retrieval of verbal information about living things. It cannot be accounted for by differences in the difficulty of retrieving knowledge of living and nonliving things, as the living and nonliving items were equated for difficulty in each experiment. When visual and nonvisual information were queried separately for living and nonliving things, the impairment was manifest for both kinds of information about living things, but for neither kind of information about nonliving things. Because this impairment resulted from brain damage sustained too early for experience to have contributed to the organisation of semantic memory, this case study supports a genetic basis for the living-nonliving distinction in semantic memory.