Knowledge of the human body: a distinct semantic domain.
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.
Coslett
H Branch
HB
Department of Neurology, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, 3400 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. hbc@mail.med.upenn.edu
Saffran
Eleanor M
EM
Schwoebel
John
J
D001284:Atrophy; D001828:Body Image; D003704:Dementia / Q000473:pathology* / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008875:Middle Aged; D012660:Semantics; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000473:pathology