A Common Representational Code for Event and Object Concepts in the Brain. J Neurosci 2025 Oct 08;45(41)
Date
08/27/2025Pubmed ID
40858497Pubmed Central ID
PMC12509485DOI
10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2166-24.2025Scopus ID
2-s2.0-105018335829 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 1 CitationAbstract
Events and objects are two fundamental ways in which humans conceptualize their experience of the world. Despite the significance of this distinction for human cognition, it remains unclear whether the neural representations of object and event concepts are categorically distinct or, instead, can be explained in terms of a shared representational code. We investigated this question by analyzing fMRI data acquired from human participants (males and females) while they rated their familiarity with the meanings of individual words (all nouns) denoting object and event concepts. Multivoxel pattern analyses indicated that both categories of lexical concepts are represented in overlapping fashion throughout the association cortex, even in the areas that showed the strongest selectivity for one or the other type in univariate contrasts. Crucially, in these areas, a feature-based model trained on neural responses to individual event concepts successfully decoded object concepts from their corresponding activation patterns (and vice versa), showing that these two categories share a common representational code. This code was effectively modeled by a set of experiential feature ratings, which also accounted for the mean activation differences between these two categories. These results indicate that neuroanatomical dissociations between events and objects emerge from quantitative differences in the cortical distribution of more fundamental features of experience. Characterizing this representational code is an important step in the development of theory-driven brain-computer interface technologies capable of decoding conceptual content directly from brain activity.
Author List
Tong JQ, Binder JR, Conant LL, Mazurchuk S, Anderson AJ, Fernandino LAuthors
Jeffrey R. Binder MD Professor in the Neurology department at Medical College of WisconsinLeonardo Fernandino PhD Associate Professor in the Neurology department at Medical College of Wisconsin
Jiaqing Tong PhD Postdoctoral Researcher 3 in the Neurology department at Medical College of Wisconsin
MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
AdultBrain
Brain Mapping
Concept Formation
Female
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Photic Stimulation
Young Adult
