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Poster A151 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Representations of Semantic Relations in the Human Brain During Active Relation Processing
Catherine Chen1 (), Lily Gong1, Fatma Deniz2, Daniel Klein1, Jack Gallant1; 1UC Berkeley, 2TU Berlin
Relations between concepts are a crucial component of human semantic knowledge. Behavioral studies have shown that relations between concepts can be classified into different types, but it is unclear how distinctions between semantic relations are reflected in the human brain. Therefore we conducted a study to characterize brain representations of semantic relations. Six participants each answered over 1000 questions involving six semantic relations while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to record BOLD responses. Then voxelwise encoding models were used to characterize the selectivity for each semantic relation in each voxel and participant separately. We find that the type of semantic relation accurately predicts brain responses throughout temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortices. These results suggest that hypothesized distinctions between semantic relations are reflected in brain representations.
Keywords: relations language fMRI BOLD