Writing Response #9:   Functional Architecture for Intelligence

The following papers are required reading for the week of November 16th:

Fedorenko, E., Behr, M. K., Kanwisher, N. (2011) Functional Specificity for High-Level Linguistic Processing in the Human Brain, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 16428-16433. Optional: Supplemental material.
Fedorenko, E., Duncan, J., Kanwisher, N. (2012) Language-Selective and Domain-General Regions Lie Side by Side within Broca's Area, Current Biology, 22, 2059-2062.

In advance of Wednesday's presentation and discussion of this reading, you should submit a response to the following question:

The papers by Fedorenko et al. (2011, 2012) provide evidence for the existence of regions of the brain that are specialized for high-level language processing. Furthermore, within Broca's area, there appears to be a language specific area adjacent to a region that is broadly engaged in a range of cognitive tasks. First briefly summarize the evidence for these conclusions and then reflect on the following general question: Why might the brain have dedicated neural circuitry for certain cognitive tasks, like language processing and the analysis of faces (e.g. the face patch network that we studied earlier)? You might consider, for example, evolutionary arguments, or benefits of such an architecture from a computational standpoint, efficiency of neural processing (e.g. access to resources needed for these tasks, access to these processes for other cognitive tasks, etc.).

You should write at most one page (500 words) in response to this question. In addition, you should also submit a question of your own, related to the reading. This writing assignment is due on Tuesday, November 17 at midnight and should be submitted to the 9.523 course site on stellar using your private account: https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/9/fa15/9.523/. If you have a problem with submitting to stellar, please send your response to Ellen Hildreth at ehildreth@wellesley.edu.