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Knowledge of the human body

A distinct semantic domain

From the Department of Neurology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (Drs. Coslett and Schwoebel), University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine; Department of Communication Sciences (Dr. Saffran), Temple University; and Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute (Drs. Coslett and Schwoebel), Philadelphia.

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. H. Branch Coslett, Department of Neurology, 3400 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104; e-mail: hbc{at}mail.med.upenn.edu

Background: Patients with selective deficits in the naming and comprehension of animals, plants, and artifacts have been reported. These descriptions of specific semantic category deficits have contributed substantially to the understanding of the architecture of semantic representations.

Objective: This study sought to further understanding of the organization of the semantic system by demonstrating that another semantic category, knowledge of the human body, may be selectively preserved.

Methods: The performance of a patient with semantic dementia was compared with the performance of healthy controls on a variety of tasks assessing distinct types of body representations, including the body schema, body image, and body structural description.

Results: Despite substantial deficits on tasks involving language and knowledge of the world generally, the patient performed normally on all tests of body knowledge except body part naming; even in this naming task, however, her performance with body parts was significantly better than on artifacts.

Conclusions: The demonstration that body knowledge may be preserved despite substantial semantic deficits involving other types of semantic information argues that body knowledge is a distinct and dissociable semantic category. These data are interpreted as support for a model of semantics that proposes that knowledge is distributed across different cortical regions reflecting the manner in which the information was acquired.

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