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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

A Distributed Cortical Network Integrates Semantic Representations of Number, Space, and Time

Evi Hendrikx¹, Alicia Zeng¹, Yashaswini¹, Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello¹, Jack L. Gallant¹; ¹University of California, Berkeley

Presenter: Evi Hendrikx

Prior studies have shown that perceptual representations of number, space, and time concepts are represented in several different regions of the human cerebral cortex. These quantities can also be represented as lexical- semantic concepts, but little is known about how lexical-semantic representations of quantity are organized across the cerebral cortex? We used voxelwise encoding models and a sparse lexical-semantic feature space, to map quantity representations in 19 participants who listened to narrative stories in the fMRI scanner. We find that quantity is represented in a distributed temporal, parietal, and frontal network. Inspection of voxel tuning profiles showed that tuning for space, time or number falls along a continuum. Voxels in some regions are highly selective for a single quantity, while those in other regions respond to all three domains. These results suggest that the brain represents space, time and number concepts in a distributed network of regions with varying degrees of cross-domain integration. This distributed network may support the flexible use of quantity concepts in everyday tasks.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures