Situated minds: Conceptual and emotional blending in neurodegeneration and beyond

Abstract

In each passing moment, our brains engage with multimodal stimuli that are both internal and external in nature. Imagine you are having an emotionally involved discussion with your partner. Focus on your own internal process while you interact with them. You are recruiting—predominantly on a subconscious level—basic cognitive skills (e.g. visuoauditory attention, sensorimotor processing, emotion recognition and interoceptive awareness) as you attempt to process the situation. Equally and concurrently, your brain is engaging multiple sources of conceptual knowledge related to past experiences. In daily interactions, affective processes are strongly intertwined, by default, with semantic (emotional and cognitive) knowledge from both experiential and declarative sources. This network of cognitive processes yields specific meaning to its beholder and allows an individual to anticipate and comprehend their socioemotional interactions in a multi-dimensional context. This view of emotion recognition ‘in the wild’ seems to be more synergistic and complex than the isolated, compartmentalized understanding of the emotion recognition process upheld by traditional neuroscientific laboratories. Even if emotion could be phenomenologically differentiated and associated with discrete brain activity, the experiential and conceptual processes dissected and isolated in neurocognitive laboratories may simply represent analytical abstractions of a holistic blending of interdependent processes (Ibanez and García, 2018). Constructionist theories are consistent with this last claim, by assuming that the emotional experience re-enacts embodied knowledge categorization (Barrett and Simmons, 2015; Adolfi et al., 2017). Prior experiences and the accumulated conceptual knowledge to which they give rise are involved in emotion recognition (Barrett and Simmons, 2015). However, these theoretical accounts seem to be in conflict with mainstream theories that assume a further compartmentalized, innate, and universal approach to affect. In this issue of Brain, Bertoux and co-workers provide evidence for the neurocognitive blending of semantic conceptual knowledge and emotion recognition in controls and patients with the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) (Bertoux et al., 2020), a disease serving as a neurodegenerative lesion model (Melloni et al., 2016) of semantic knowledge impairments that has also been associated with emotional deficits (Fittipaldi et al., 2019)...