Relevance

March 11, 2010, 8:19 am • Tags: , ,

icon_35Semantic memory refers to the memory of meanings, understandings, and other concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experience. It refers to general facts and meanings we share with others. The conscious recollection of factual information and general knowledge about the world is independent of context and personal relevance.

It includes generalized knowledge that does not involve memory of a specific event. For instance, you can answer a question like “Are wrenches pets or tools?” without remembering any specific event in which you learned that wrenches are tools. What is stored in semantic memory is the “gist” of experience, an abstract structure that applies to a wide variety of experiential objects and which may be said to delineate categorical and functional relationships between them.

Rather than any one brain region playing a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all semantic knowledge, semantic memory is a collection of functionally and anatomically distinct systems where each attribute-specific system is tied to a sensor modality (i.e. vision) and even more specifically to a property within that modality (i.e. color).

Neuroimaging studies suggest a distinction between semantic processing and sensor processing, and reveal a large distributed network of semantic representations that are organized minimally by attribute and additionally by category. These networks include extensive regions of form, color and motion knowledge that collectively interpret stimuli.