Neural representation of social concepts: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of fMRI studies

The possible uniqueness of social stimuli constitutes a key topic for cognitive neuroscience. Growing evidence highlights graded contributions to their semantic processing by the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), where the omni-category response displayed by its ventrolateral sector might reflect the integration of information relayed from other regions. Among these, the superior polar ATL was specifically associated with representing social concepts. However, most previous studies neglected the close relationship between social and emotional semantic features, which might confound interpreting the degree of overlap vs. specificity of social and emotional conceptual processing. We addressed this issue via two activation-likelihood-estimation meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies reporting brain structures associated with processing social or emotional concepts. Alongside a common involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, we found social and emotional concepts to be specifically associated with lateral temporal areas (including the superior polar ATL) and the amygdala, respectively. These results support the specialization of distinct sectors of the fronto-temporo-limbic circuitry for processing social vs. emotional concepts, and the integration of their output in medial prefrontal regions underlying the regulation of social behavior. These results pave the way for further studies addressing the neural bases of conceptual knowledge, its impairment after fronto-temporal brain damage, and the effect of rehabilitative interventions targeting its main functional modules.