Conceptual Combination

 描述(由申请人提供)：大脑和大脑研究中的一个中心问题是概念是如何表达的。这个问题不仅指导基础科学研究，而且对我们理解神经退行性疾病和影响语言和记忆的急性神经系统疾病也有影响。在过去的二十年里，我们(以及我们在认知心理学、神经心理学和神经科学领域的许多同事)一直试图通过“拆解概念”来理解对概念的长期记忆的认知和神经结构。拟议项目的目标是“将概念重新组合在一起”，使用互补方法的组合，以便了解特征如何融入概念以及概念如何融入事件。具体地说，(1)我们的目标是了解特征是如何组合(然后重新组合)和整合成概念的，无论是孤立的还是组合的；(2)我们的目标是了解概念是如何与其他概念相联系的；(3)我们的目标是表征前颞叶(ATL)和角回(AG)在语义记忆中所起的作用。我们相信，拟议的研究将对该领域产生重大和持久的影响，将研究人员从如何表示个别特征或概念的问题转移到更紧迫的问题，即如何灵活地组合和重组所有这些信息，以产生无限数量的想法。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A central question in the study of the mind and brain is how concepts are represented. This question guides basic science research but also has implications for our understanding of neurodegenerative disorders and acute neurological conditions that affect language and memory. For the past two decades we (and many of our colleagues in the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience) have been trying to understand the cognitive and neural structure of long-term memory for concepts by "taking the concepts apart". The goal of the proposed project is to "put concepts back together", using a combination of complementary methods in order to understand how features are integrated into concepts and how concepts are integrated into events. Specifically, (1) We aim to understand how features are combined (and then re-combined) and integrated into concepts, both in isolation and in combination; (2) We aim to understand how concepts are interpreted in relation to other concepts; (3) We aim to characterize the roles that the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) and the angular gyrus (AG) play in semantic memory. We believe the proposed research stands to have a major and sustained impact on the field, by moving researchers away from the question of how individual features or concepts are represented to the more pressing question of how all of that information can be flexibly combined and recombined to generate an infinite number of ideas.