UC Berkeley

Context is an important part of understanding the meaning of natural language, but most neuroimaging studies of meaning use isolated words and isolated sentences with little context. Because the brain may process natural language differently from how it processes simplified stimuli, it is unclear whether prior results on word meaning generalize to natural language. In Chapter 1, I present a neuroimaging experiment that examines whether the results of neuroimaging studies that use stimuli with little context generalize to natural language. Results show that context both affects the quality of neuroimaging data and changes where and how semantic information is represented in the brain. This suggests that findings from studies using stimuli with little context do not generalize to natural language.

In Chapters 2 and 3, I present two neuroimaging experiments that map representations of social information in the brain. Relationships are an integral part of life, and people store extensive knowledge about themselves, other individuals, and their dynamics to maintain these relationships. Many prior neuroimaging studies have investigated where different types of social information are represented in the brain. However, because of methodological limitations in these studies, the representation of social information in the brain remains unclear. In Chapter 2, I present a neuroimaging experiment that simultaneously maps the representation of five types of social information that have been investigated in prior studies. Results show that only three of these five types of social information are represented in the brain, and that individual brain regions each represent one type of social information. In Chapter 3, I present a neuroimaging experiment that maps the representation of the self and six different types of other people. Preliminary results from this experiment suggest that the brain represents the self and different types of others in distinct brain regions. These data also reveal three possible axes along which the brain may organize information about the self and others.