Though efforts have been made for centuries, how concepts are represented in the brain is still elusive. The embodiment view claims that the sensory, motor and other brain areas through which people acquire concept information during life experiences represent this information during concept retrieval. Some compelling neurobiological evidence…

Remote association, the ability to form new relations between independent elements, was assessed using the Remote Associates Test (RAT). The Chinese RAT (CRAT) includes the Chinese radical RAT (CRRAT), Chinese word RAT (CWRAT), and Chinese compound RAT (CCRAT). Behavioral research indicates that an individual's performance on the CRAT reflects…

Language proficiency diagnosis is essential to extract fine-grained information about the linguistic knowledge states and skill mastery levels of test takers based on their performance on language tests. Different from comprehensive standardized tests, many language learning apps often revolve around word-level questions. Therefore, knowledge…

Learning counterintuitive scientific concepts can be difficult for students because they often have misconceptions about natural phenomena that lead them to commit errors. Recent studies showed that students with advanced scientific training recruit brain regions associated with inhibitory control and memory retrieval to avoid committing errors…

Neuro-marketing, neuro-economics, and now the field of neuro-information systems (neuro-IS) is growing, and our students want to know more about it all. This paper presents the examination of the learning-needs of new entrants to the field of neuro-IS. The resulting elective course is targeted at IS undergraduate majors interested in learning…

Like language, semantic memory is productive: It extends itself through self-derivation of new information through logical processes such as analogy, deduction, and induction, for example. Though it is clear these productive processes occur, little is known about the time course over which newly self-derived information becomes incorporated into…

We used ERP methodology to investigate how readers validate discourse concepts and update situation models when those concepts followed factive (e.g., knew) and nonfactive (e.g., "guessed") verbs, and also when they were true, false, or indeterminate with reference to previous discourse. Following factive verbs, early (P2) and later brain…

Conceptual expansion, one of the core operations in creative cognition, was investigated in the present ERP study. An experimental paradigm using novel metaphoric, nonsensical and literal phrases was employed where individual differences in conceptual knowledge organization were accounted for by using participants' responses to categorize the…

Where do scientists' superior abilities originate from when generating a creative idea? What different brain functions are activated between scientists and i) general academic high school students and ii) science high school students when generating a biological hypothesis? To reveal brain level explanations for these questions, this paper…

A central topic in cognitive neuroscience concerns the representation of concepts and the specific neural mechanisms that mediate conceptual knowledge. Recently proposed modal theories assert that concepts are grounded on the integration of multimodal, distributed representations. The aim of the present work is to complement the available…

Logic has been intertwined with the study of language and meaning since antiquity, and such connections persist in present day research in linguistic theory (formal semantics) and cognitive psychology (e.g., studies of human reasoning). However, few studies in cognitive neuroscience have addressed logical dimensions of sentence-level language…

The embodied cognition approach to the study of the mind proposes that higher order mental processes such as concept formation and language are essentially based on perceptual and motor processes. Contrary to the classical approach in cognitive science, in which concepts are viewed as amodal, arbitrary symbols, embodied semantics argues that…

Conceptual knowledge of our world is represented in semantic memory in terms of concepts and semantic relations between concepts. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the cortical regions underlying the processing of sequential and taxonomic relations. Participants were presented verbal cues and performed three tasks:…

Using both the lesion method and functional imaging (positron emission tomography) in large cohorts of subjects investigated with the same experimental tasks, we tested the following hypotheses: (A) that the retrieval of words which denote concrete entities belonging to distinct conceptual categories depends upon partially segregated regions in…