Neural locus of non-linguistic thematic role assignment

Determine the precise neural locus and mechanism in the primate brain that non-linguistically assigns thematic roles (agent, patient, action) to perceived agents in a scene, and ascertain its relationship to the left temporoparietal junction (lTPJ), which has been proposed as a multimodal hub integrating perceptual inputs to form coherent situation representations.

Background

Assigning who is doing what to whom in observed scenes is a fundamental cognitive operation that supports language and social cognition. The paper reviews evidence suggesting a domain-general processing role for the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), including theory-of-mind functions and integration of multimodal perceptual inputs, and notes classical neuropsychological findings consistent with separate non-linguistic role computation.

To support their language acquisition model, the authors posit Role areas (agent, action, patient, scene) and acknowledge that the exact biological seat of the role-assignment computation is not identified. Clarifying the cortical or network substrate of this mechanism would anchor the proposed architecture and its interfaces with lexical and syntactic areas.