Representations of semantic relations in the human cerebral cortex (Chen et al., bioRxiv preprint, 2026)
February 19, 2026
Little is known about how semantic relations between concepts are encoded in the human brain. We collected fMRI data while participants answered relation-verification questions about over 1000 concept pairs (e.g., bicycle has-part wheel), then fit voxelwise encoding models to identify where and how each relation is represented. Semantic relations and concepts are encoded in the same bilateral temporal, parietal, and prefrontal regions; most voxels are preferentially selective for a single relation, and the cortical organization of preferred relations is consistent across participants.