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

该研究计划的总体目标是增进我们对大脑如何存储和使用知识的基本理解。该研究旨在回答该领域的三个核心问题：（1）心智/大脑中代表了哪些知识？ (2) 这些知识是如何存储和组织的？ (3) 在需要时如何获取和使用这些知识？我的研究结合了多种技术来解决这些问题，包括对人类参与者进行的实验、开发关于思维/大脑如何存储和处理知识的计算机模拟，以及使用脑电图 (EEG) 来测量头皮的电位，这使我们能够推断出参与处理知识的大脑区域的时间过程。该研究旨在作为三个相互关联的项目进行。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，旨在帮助我们理解在人类数据中观察到的行为模式。最后，脑电图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处理单词意义时变得活跃的时间过程。这项研究以重要的方式扩展了我们已知的知识：它将提供对抽象知识如何表示的深入理解，它将提供语义认知的计算机模型，可用于导出对未来实验的预测并理解患者行为，并且它将显着扩展我们对何时计算语义知识的不同方面的理解，建立在功能磁共振成像提供的关于语义知识在大脑中存储位置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.