References for biologically plausible models of knowledge representation?

Question

I'm looking for references that deal with the issue of how various kinds of semantic knowledge is (or might be) neurally represented. Most of the discussion of this topic seems skewed by social psychologists, who talk in very high level terms of how various semantic constructs (such as goals) might be represented, based on behavioral observations (c.f. Eitam & Higgins, 2010). But it's been hard to find accounts that are both closer to the metal (that consider neural plausibility) and also high level (that treat semantics more complex than associative strength between generic nodes.)

Can anyone point me to good material on this topic?

References:

• Eitam, B., & Higgins, E. T. (2010). Motivation in Mental Accessibility: Relevance of a Representation (ROAR) as a New Framework. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Relevance of a Representation, 4(10), 951–967, free pdf

Answer 1

In my experience, the term "semantic knowledge" (or semantic memory or conceptual knowledge) is generally used to refer to knowledge of objects, word meanings, facts and people, without connection to any particular time or place. The neural basis of this kind of knowledge is more or less agreed to depend on a distributed network of cortical brain regions (e.g., Martin, 2007; Patterson, Nestor, & Rogers, 2007). Tim Rogers and Jay McClelland (e.g., Rogers & McClelland, 2004) are among the leaders in developing biologically plausible computational models of semantic memory (and many others are working on it as well).

Goals are usually put in the domain of "executive functions" or "cognitive control" and generally associated with prefrontal (and frontal) cortical regions. I know somewhat less about this area of research, but there are definitely biologically plausible models being developed, including by Botvinick and Plaut (2004) and you might find what you're looking for in the work of Munakata and O'Reilly (e.g., Munakata et al., 2011)

References

• Botvinick, M. M., & Plaut, D. C. (2004). Doing Without Schema Hierarchies: A Recurrent Connectionist Approach to Normal and Impaired Routine Sequential Action. Psychological Review, 111(2), 395-429, free pdf.

• Martin, A. (2007). The representation of object concepts in the brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 25-45, free pdf.

• Munakata, Y., Herd, S. A., Chatham, C. H., Depue, B. E., Banich, M. T., & O’Reilly, R. C. (2011). A unified framework for inhibitory control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(10), 453-459.

• Patterson, K. E., Nestor, P. J., & Rogers, T. T. (2007). Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 976-987, free pdf.

• Rogers, T. T., & McClelland, J. L. (2004). Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.