Semantic cognition: behavioural, computational, and EEG/ERP based analyses of semantic content, structure, and processing

这个研究项目的广泛目标是推进我们对知识如何在大脑中存储和使用的基本理解。这项研究旨在回答这一领域的三个核心问题：(1)什么知识在头脑/大脑中表现出来？(2)这些知识是如何储存和组织的？(3)在需要时如何获取和使用这些知识？我的研究结合了许多技术来解决这些问题，包括与人类参与者进行的实验，心灵/大脑如何存储和处理知识的计算机模拟的发展，以及使用脑电图（EEG）来测量头皮的电位，这使我们能够推断涉及处理知识的大脑区域的时间过程。这项研究被设计成三个相互关联的项目。首先，我将通过要求大量参与者描述他们认为在概念表征中重要的信息来研究人们概念表征的内容。这些信息将用于设计行为实验的刺激，这些实验旨在测试当代语义记忆组织和处理理论，并用于设计计算机模拟，以帮助我们理解我们在人类数据中观察到的行为模式。最后，EEG将用于帮助我们理解不同类型的语义和基于单词的变量在单词的意义处理中变得活跃的时间过程。这项研究在重要方面扩展了我们已经知道的东西：它将提供对抽象知识如何表示的深刻理解，它将提供语义认知的计算机模型，可用于推导未来实验的预测和理解患者行为，它将显著扩展我们对语义知识不同方面的计算时间的理解，建立在fMRI提供的关于语义知识存储在大脑中的丰富知识的基础上。

The broad aim of this research program is to advance our fundamental understanding of how knowledge is stored and used in the brain. The research is designed to answer three questions that are central to this area: (1) What knowledge is represented in the mind/brain?; (2) How is that knowledge stored and organized?; and (3) How is that knowledge accessed and used when needed? My research combines a number of techniques in addressing these questions, including experiments conducted with human participants, the development of computer simulations of how the mind/brain stores and processes knowledge, and the use of electroencephalography (EEG) to measure electrical potentials at the scalp, which allow us to draw inferences about the time course of brain regions involved in processing knowledge. The research is designed to take place as three interrelated projects. First, I will be studying the content of people's conceptual representations by asking a very large number of participants to describe the information they think is important in representations of concepts. This information will be used to design stimuli for behavioral experiments that are designed to test among contemporary theories of semantic memory organization and processing, and for designing computer simulations intended to help us understand the behavioral patterns we observe in the human data. Finally, EEG will be used to help us understand the time course over which different types of semantic and word-based variables become active in the processing of words for meaning. This research extends what we already know in important ways: it will provide a deep understanding of how abstract knowledge is represented, it will provide a computer model of semantic cognition that can be used to derive predictions for future experiments and to understand patient behaviour, and it will significantly extend our understanding of when different aspects of semantic knowledge are computed, building on the rich knowledge fMRI has provided about where semantic knowledge is stored in the brain.