Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A central problem concerning the organization of the cognitive semantic web is to understand how different cate-gories of words are stored in the brain with a well-defined topographical organization. This topography is a natural constructionthat plausibly is strongly related with the syntactic and semantic organization of natural languages. An eloquent experimentalevidence of the existence of a continuous semantic representation of object and action categories in the human brain has beenpublished by Huth et al (Neuron 76:1210, 2012). One of the ways to explain the emergence of a topographical organization inthe brain cortex using neurocomputational models, is by means of Kohonen’s self-organizing maps. Here we show that thesetopographies can be operationally represented with associative memories spatially organized by tensor contexts. We illustrateformally and numerically this fact. In addition, we show that, consistently with evidence from pathology, different semanticcategories can be specifically damaged.