Functional Properties of Concepts: Studies of Normal and Brain-damaged Patients

Abstract

It has been claimed that concepts in different semantic domains vary in the extent to which their meaning is comprised of different kinds of semantic information. Discussion has mainly focused around two kinds of concepts- living things and man-made objects- arguing that functional information is central to the meaning of artefacts whereas perceptual information is more important for the meaning of living things. This distinction has been important in accounting for patterns of semantic impairments following brain injury Warrington & Shallice, 1984. We suggest that functional information may be especially salient in the semantic representations of both living and nonliving things. Our evidence for this claim comes from priming studies with normal subjects, and data from brain-damaged patients that supports the claim that functional information is relatively spared following brain damage. We explore further implications of the role of functional properties in semantic representations, considering distinctions between different types of functional information in the representation of living things. We focus on the developmental claim that biological functional information, such as the fact that animals breathe, reproduce, and eat, is especially salient in the semantic representations of living things. Data from a patient suffering from herpes encephalitis suggests that this type of functional information is preserved even though other types of functional information where an animal lives, what it eats are impaired. Finally, we account for the relative preservation of functional information in terms of form-function intercorrelations.