The ability to identify individual objects or events as members of a kind (e.g., “knife,” “dog,” or “party”) is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. It allows us to quickly access a wealth of information pertaining to a newly encountered object or event and use it to guide our behavior. How is this information represented in the brain? We used functional MRI to analyze patterns of brain activity corresponding to hundreds of familiar concepts and quantitatively characterized the informational structure of these patterns. Our results indicate that conceptual knowledge is stored as patterns of neural activity that encode sensory-motor and affective information about each concept, contrary to the long-held idea that concept representations are independent of sensory-motor experience.
Anonymized blood oxygen level–dependent MRI data have been deposited in the Open Science Framework ([67][1]) (). Previously published data were used for this work (;…