Different brain activation patterns during production of animals versus artefacts: a PET activation study on category-specific processing

: Laine M, Rinne JO, Hiltunen J, Kaasinen V, Sipila H

Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

: 2002

: Cognitive Brain Research

: COGNITIVE BRAIN RESEARCH

: COGNITIVE BRAIN RES

: PII S0926-6410(01)00095-7

: 13

: 1

: 95

: 99

: 5

: 0926-6410

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0926-6410(01)00095-7

To study neural correlates of category-specific processing, we measured relative cerebral blood flow changes by PET (oxygen-15) in young healthy subjects while they produced exemplars of animals or artefacts to written subcategory prompts. In comparison to a baseline (word reading), production of animal names elicited increased rCBF in the right inferior temporal region. This fits to recent lesion data on semantic impairment with animals, as well as imaging data on object recognition and semantic retrieval. In our study, it may represent an involvement of visual imagery in generation of animal names. In contrast, production of artefact names elicited increased rCBF in frontoparietal regions previously related to attention and mental effort. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.