Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Category-specific semantic deficits refers to the inability to name objects from a particular category while the naming of words outside that category is relatively unimpaired. We suggest that such semantic deficits arise from the random lesioning of a unified semantic network in which internal category representations reflect the variability of the categories themselves. This is demonstrated by lesioning networks that have learned to categorise butterfiies and chairs. The model shows category-specific semantic deficits of the narrower (butterfly) category with the occasional reverse semantic deficits of relatively impaired chair category.