Person-knowledge encompasses the diverse types of knowledge we have about other people. This knowledge spans the social, physical, episodic, semantic & nominal information we possess about others and is served by a distributed cortical network including core (perceptual) and extended (non-perceptual) subsystems. Our understanding of this cortical system is tightly linked to the perception of faces and the extent to which cortical knowledge-access processes are independent of perception is unclear. In this study, participants were presented with the written names of famous people and performed ten different semantic access tasks drawn from five cognitive domains (biographic, episodic, nominal, social and physical). We used representational similarity analysis, adapted to investigate network-level representations (NetRSA) to characterise the inter-regional functional coordination within the non-perceptual extended subsystem across access to varied forms of person-knowledge. Results indicate a hierarchical cognitive taxonomy consistent with that seen during face-processing and forming the same three macro-domains: socio-perceptual judgements, episodic-semantic memory and nominal knowledge. The coordination across regions was largely preserved within elements of the extended system associated with internalised cognition but differed in prefrontal regions. Results suggest the elements of the extended system work together in a consistent way to access knowledge when viewing faces and names but that coordination patterns also change as a function of input-processing demands.
Keywords: Cortical network; Face perception; Person knowledge; Representational similarity analysis; fMRI.
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