<b>The investigation of commonalities in human brain semantic representations across people and across languages</b><br>

Resumo

Recent studies on the organization of conceptual knowledge in the human brain have reported the remarkable ability to predict the word a person is thinking about, or the picture a person is seeing, from their brain activity. By using Machine Learning techniques to analyze neuroimaging data, researchers have been able to find stable patterns of brain activity across different people. These patterns allow computer algorithms to identify the brain activity associated with a specific word or picture. The studies have also reported striking commonalities across different people’s neural signature for the conceptual knowledge associated with thinking about words. The communal characteristic of the organization of meaning allows for the prediction of what one person is thinking about based on another person’s brain activity. The results of some of these studies and the implications for research on cognitive processes and second language learning/acquisition are discussed. Preliminary results from a brain imaging study on cross-language thought identification are also presented. These recent findings in neuroimaging of human semantics suggest the presence of a common semantic neural representation across people and across languages.