N400 modulation by categorical or associative interference in a famous face naming task

Exploring the Representations of Individual Entities in the Brain Combining EEG and Distributional Semantics

Semantic knowledge about individual entities (i.e., the referents of proper names such as Jacinta Ardern) is fine-grained, episodic, and strongly social in nature, when compared with knowledge about generic entities (the referents of common nouns such as politician). We investigate the semantic representations of individual entities in the brain; and for the first time we approach this question using both neural data, in the form of newly-acquired EEG data, and distributional models of word meaning, employing them to isolate semantic information regarding individual entities in the brain. We ran two sets of analyses. The first set of analyses is only concerned with the evoked responses to individual entities and their categories. We find that it is possible to classify them according to both their coarse and their fine-grained category at appropriate timepoints, but that it is hard to map representational information learned from individuals to their categories. In the second set of analyses, we learn to decode from evoked responses to distributional word vectors. These results indicate that such a mapping can be learnt successfully: this counts not only as a demonstration that representations of individuals can be discriminated in EEG responses, but also as a first brain-based validation of distributional semantic models as representations of individual entities. Finally, in-depth analyses of the decoder performance provide additional evidence that the referents of proper names and categories have little in common when it comes to their representation in the brain.

The cognitive psychology and neuroscience of naming people

The use of proper names enables us to designate entities, including people, at a very specific level of categorization: the unique entity or the individual. The paper presents a general overview of psychological/cognitive and neuroscientific studies that have compared the production of proper names, in particular people's names, with the production of common nouns during the last thirty years. The search for specific brain correlates of proper naming included single-case and group studies of patients with brain lesions, and studies utilizing functional neuroimaging or brain electrical stimulation with healthy participants. These studies have led neuroscientists to hypothesize that the recall of proper names involves a rather complex network including mainly left frontal and temporal regions. Behavioural evidence supports the view that proper names are more difficult to recall than common names, and scientists have proposed different explanations for this relative difficulty. Finally, several new directions for future research are proposed to improve our understanding of both cognitive processes and their brain correlates involved during proper name recall.