Category-specific medial temporal lobe activation and the consolidation of semantic memory: evidence from fMRI

Semantic memory consolidation was studied by comparing medial temporal lobe (MTL) fMRI activation to ANIMAL, IMPLEMENT and ABSTRACT nouns in healthy seniors to that of young adults. Relative to healthy seniors, young adults were predicted to show greater MTL activation for IMPLEMENTS, but not ANIMALS, because the ANIMALS category consists of highly intercorrelated and overlapping features that should require less MTL-mediated binding than IMPLEMENTS over a shorter period of time during concept consolidation. ABSTRACT meanings are context-dependent and do not consist of fixed feature sets. Thus it was predicted that ABSTRACT words would not involve age-related feature binding mediated by the MTL. These predictions were confirmed by the results. Our observations are consistent with the hypothesis that the structure of a category influences the consolidation of knowledge in semantic memory. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.