# Semantic Systems

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA AT COLUMBIA · 2020 · $332,549

## Abstract

Project Summary Abstract.
Conceptual or semantic knowledge refers to information about objects, actions, relations, self, culture, and
includes meanings of words and phrases. The use of this knowledge is pervasive and automatic in daily life.
Everyday activities such as communication, recognition and use of objects, social interactions, and decision
making are crucially reliant on conceptual knowledge. Impairment of this complex and widely distributed
system has serious consequences for quality of life. Several neurological and psychiatric disorders are
associated with the impairment of this system, including stroke with aphasia, dementias, temporal lobe
epilepsy, schizophrenia, and autism. Understanding the structure and organization of this system, and the
specific ways it is disrupted in these individuals, is critical for developing better treatments and rehabilitation
strategies. The goal of this research is to understand the structure and use of this information, its neural basis,
and the ways in which it can be impaired by neuropathology. Here, we focus on a brain region that has
emerged as a core component of the conceptual system: anterior temporal lobe. This brain region has been
the subject of intense research for over two decades not just in semantics, but in a number of other domains
such as social cognition, sentence processing, and naming of familiar people and places. This has generated a
rich and complex set of findings, some of which are often difficult to reconcile with each other. Insights into the
function of this region that can shed light on its role in myriad functions would clearly be very valuable. Using
neuroimaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and studies of patients with stroke, we examine predictions of
a novel theory that can account for many findings relating to the anterior temporal lobe. The proposed
experiments will shed new light on the organization and function of this core semantic region in the healthy and
impaired brain.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9974006
- **Project number:** 1R01DC017162-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA AT COLUMBIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Rutvik H Desai
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $332,549
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-05-15 → 2025-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9974006

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9974006, Semantic Systems (1R01DC017162-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9974006. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*