 On the other hand, it is also known that “semantic” (i.e., conceptual) competence may be lost in its entirety (though often gradually). This is what typically happens in semantic dementia. Empirical evidence has motivated theories of the neural realization of conceptual competence that are meant to account for both modality-specific deficits and pathologies that involve impairment across all modalities. The former may involve a difficulty or impossibility to categorize a visually exhibited object which, however, can be correctly categorized in other modalities (e.g., if the object is touched) or verbally described on the basis of the object’s name (i.e., on the basis of the lexical item supposedly associated with the category). The original “hub and spokes” model of the brain representation of concepts (Rogers et al. 2004, Patterson et al. 2007) accounted for both sets of findings by postulating that the semantic network is composed of a series of “spokes”, i.e., cortical areas distributed across the brain processing modality-specific (visual, auditory, motor, as well as verbal) sources of information, and that the spokes are two-ways connected to a transmodal “hub”. While damage to the spokes accounts for modality-specific deficits, damage to the hub and its connections explains the overall impairment of semantic competence. On this model, the hub is supposed to be located in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), since semantic dementia had been found to be associated with degeneration of the anterior ventral and polar regions of both temporal poles (Guo et al. 2013). According to more recent, “graded” versions of the model (Lambon Ralph et al. 2017), the contribution of the hub units may vary depending on different patterns of connectivity to the spokes, to account for evidence of graded variation of function across subregions of ATL. It should be noted that while many researchers converge on a distributed view of semantic representation and on the role of domain-specific parts of the neural network (depending on differential patterns of functional connectivity), not everybody agrees on the need to postulate a transmodal hub (see, e.g., Mahon &amp; Caramazza 2011).