Is a single 'hub', with lots of spokes, an accurate description of the neural architecture of action semantics? Comment on 'Action semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of multimodal and modality-specific object knowledge' by van Elk, van Schie and Bekkering

摘要

How is knowledge about tools and their associated actions represented in the brain? In their otherwise excellent review of the behavioral, developmental, and neuropsychological literatures, Van Elk, van Schie, and Bekkering [16] argue that the so-called 'hub and spoke' architecture [12] provides a good answer. Semantics, in this model, is "represented across modality-specific 'spokes' that converge in a multimodal association area (i.e. the 'semantic hub') that provides an amodal representation of semantic information". Exactly what type of information is contained in an 'amodal' object representation, and how this representation is created from the convergence of information from multiple modalities, is left unsaid.