Spatiotemporal characteristics of the neural representation of event concepts.

• Representation of lexical event concepts examined using two fMRI and EEG studies. • Event nouns compared to object nouns matched for concreteness in two tasks. • Left AG, ATL, and PCC identified for event compared to object concepts. • ERPs show greater amplitude for events in 300–500 ms window. • Event concepts are represented in major semantic hub regions. Events are a fundamentally important part of our understanding of the world. How lexical concepts denoting events are represented in the brain remains controversial. We conducted two experiments using event and object nouns matched on a range of psycholinguistic variables, including concreteness, to examine spatial and temporal characteristics of event concepts. Both experiments used magnitude and valence tasks on event and object nouns. The fMRI experiment revealed a distributed set of regions for events, including the angular gyrus, anterior temporal lobe, and posterior cingulate across tasks. In the EEG experiment, events and objects differed in amplitude within the 300–500 ms window. Together these results shed light into the spatiotemporal characteristics of event concept representation and show that event concepts are represented in the putative hubs of the semantic system. While these hubs are typically associated with object semantics, they also represent events, and have a likely role in temporal integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]