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Damage to temporoparietal cortex is sufficient for impaired semantic control

Thompson, Hannah E.; Noonan, Krist A.; Halai, Ajay D.; Hoffman, Paul; Stampacchia, Sara; Hallam, Glyn; Rice, Grace E.; De Dios Perez, Blanca; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.; Jefferies, Elizabeth

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Authors

Hannah E. Thompson

Krist A. Noonan

Ajay D. Halai

Paul Hoffman

Sara Stampacchia

Glyn Hallam

Grace E. Rice

Matthew A. Lambon Ralph

Elizabeth Jefferies



Abstract

Semantic control allows us to focus semantic activation on currently relevant aspects of knowledge, even in the face of competition or when the required information is weakly encoded. Diverse cortical regions, including left prefrontal and posterior temporal cortex, are implicated in semantic control, however; the relative contribution of these regions is unclear. For the first time, we compared semantic aphasia (SA) patients with damage restricted to temporoparietal cortex (TPC; N = 8) to patients with infarcts encompassing prefrontal cortex (PF+; N = 22), to determine if prefrontal lesions are necessary for semantic control deficits. These SA groups were also compared with semantic dementia (SD; N = 10), characterised by degraded semantic representations. We asked whether TPC cases with semantic impairment show controlled retrieval deficits equivalent to PF+ cases or conceptual degradation similar to patients with SD. Independent of lesion location, the SA subgroups showed similarities, whereas SD patients showed a qualitatively distinct semantic impairment. Relative to SD, both TPC and PF+ SA subgroups: (1) showed few correlations in performance across tasks with differing control demands, but a strong relationship between tasks of similar difficulty; (2) exhibited attenuated effects of lexical frequency and concept familiarity, (3) showed evidence of poor semantic regulation in their verbal output – performance on picture naming was substantially improved when provided with a phonological cue, and (4) showed effects of control demands, such as retrieval difficulty, which were equivalent in severity across TPC and PF+ groups. These findings show that semantic impairment in SA is underpinned by damage to a distributed semantic control network, instantiated across anterior and posterior cortical areas.

Citation

Thompson, H. E., Noonan, K. A., Halai, A. D., Hoffman, P., Stampacchia, S., Hallam, G., …Jefferies, E. (2022). Damage to temporoparietal cortex is sufficient for impaired semantic control. Cortex, 156, 71-85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.05.022

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 16, 2022
Online Publication Date Jul 8, 2022
Publication Date Nov 1, 2022
Deposit Date Aug 4, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Cortex
Print ISSN 0010-9452
Electronic ISSN 1973-8102
Publisher Elsevier BV
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 156
Pages 71-85
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.05.022
Keywords Cognitive Neuroscience; Experimental and Cognitive Psychology; Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/9085321
Publisher URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945222001952?via%3Dihub