Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The cortical organization of the semantic network has beenstudied extensively in neuropsychological and neuroimagingstudies. Recent theories have heavily relied on theobservation of category-specific activations, i.e., thepreferential activations in brain regions for specific semanticcategories. With decades of research, a full understanding ofthe organization has not yet been reached, since little isknown about the factors that contribute to the variances inobserved activation patterns across numerous neuroimagingstudies. In this study, we first reviewed 97 published papersthat reported category-specific activations for living ornonliving concepts in the past two decades. Then, using theActivation Likelihood Estimate (ALE) method, wecharacterized the brain activation associated with living andnonliving concepts, revealing the influences of relevantfactors (e.g., neuroimaging mode, task demands, and stimulimodality), and analyzing these findings in relation totheoretical accounts of cortical semantic networks.