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A fundamental problem in cognitive neuroscience is how the brain realizes semantic memory. It is generally accepted that semantic memory consists of stored information about the main features of an object, some processing mechanisms which allow a person to retrieve these features from partial cues, and to link them with lexical aspects and words. The final result is a kind of knowledge which is context independent, can be shared with other people and can produce language and thought (Tulving 1972). Many conceptual theories of semantic memory have been proposed in past decades, based on two fundamental pieces of information: the behavior of patients with neurological lesions in specific brain areas, who exhibit deficits in word recognition, and results of more recent neuroimaging studies, putting in evidence which different brain areas participate to semantic tasks. The interested reader can find several excellent review papers on the subject (Martin & Chao 2001; Hart et al. 2007). Just the main fundamental issues, essential for the comprehension of the present chapter, are summarized below. First, most theories agree in assuming that semantic memory is not a localized process, but one which involves a highly distributed representation of features and which engages several different cortical areas, located in the sensory and motor regions of the cortex. This concept may help explaining the existence of patients with category-specific semantic deficits (for instance, patients with impairment in word recognition for living things but no impairment for recognition of non-living objects, or patients with impairment for nouns vs. verbs (Warrington & Shallice 1984; Caramazza & Shelton 1998)). Damasio (Damasio 1989), suggested that semantic representation is fragmented in many motor and sensory features, which must then be integrated in a “convergence zone”. Accordingly, Warrington et al. (Warrington & McCarthy 1987), assumed the presence of multiple channels which separately process sensory and motor aspects of objects; these two main systems would be especially important to identify living and non-living objects, respectively. Several subsequent extensions, improvements or variations of this theory were formulated by various groups (Caramazza et al. 1990; Lauro-Grotto et al. 1997; Humphreys & Forde 2001; Snowden et al. 2004; Gainotti 2006). Nevertheless, all these theories substantially agree in

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The Representation of Objects in the Brain, and Its Link with Semantic Memory and Language: a Conceptual Theory with the Support of a Neurocomputational Model