Event-related evoked potential study of repetition priming to attended and unattended words (original) (raw)
Related papers
An Event-Related Brain Potential Analysis of Visual Word Priming Effects
Brain and Language, 2000
Two experiments are reported that provide evidence on task-induced effects during visual lexical processing in a prime-target semantic priming paradigm. The research focuses on target expectancy effects by manipulating the proportion of semantically related and unrelated word pairs. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task was used and reaction times (RTs) and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained. In Experiment 2, subjects silently read the stimuli, without any additional task demands, and ERPs were recorded. The RT and ERP results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that an expectancy mechanism contributed to the priming effect when a high proportion of related word pairs was presented. The ERP results of Experiment 2 show that in the absence of extraneous task requirements, an expectancy mechanism is not active. However, a standard ERP semantic priming effect was obtained in Experiment 2. The combined results show that priming effects due to relatedness proportion are induced by task demands and are not a standard aspect of online lexical processing.
Neuropsychology, 1997
The proposition that cortically based perceptual representation systems (PRSs) are responsible for some implicit priming phenomena was examined by using event-related potentials (ERPs) in repetition and masked word priming. Experiment 1 used an explicit recognition task, in which repeated words replicated previous ERP repetition priming effects, whereas masked repetition priming revealed a new ERP effect with a posterior topography. Experiment 2 demonstrated ERP and behavioral priming in a lexical decision task for repetition and masked repetition priming. Topographical mapping of ERP repetition priming effects involved both early and late effects over the right and left anterior regions, whereas masked priming produced only an early ERP effect posteriorly. These results suggest differences between early and late ERP priming effects in terms of explicit recollection. Moreover, a posterior PRS may not be involved in some longer term implicit repetition priming effects.
Event-related brain potentials as indices of information extraction and response priming
Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1990
Measures of overt response and of the event-related brain potential (ERP) were used to investigate the processing of a priming stimulus varying in its information content. Subjects were shown sequences of 2 letters that served as a priming and an imperative stimulus. In 3 randomly interspersed conditions the imperative stimulus had a 0.80, 0.50, or 0.20 probability of physically matching the priming letter. The different probability conditions were signaled by the position of a dot flanking the priming letter. Reaction time and accuracy data indicated that the subjects primed their responses as a function of the information conveyed by the priming stimulus. The amplitude and latency of the P300 to the priming stimulus were sensitive to the amount of information conveyed by the priming stimulus and the duration of the processing required. The readiness potential in the foreperiod was lateralized as a function of the priming stimulus. Furthermore, the larger the amplitude of the P300 to the priming stimulus, the larger the lateralization of the readiness potential, indicating that information extraction, indexed by the P300, was related to response priming, indexed by the readiness potential. The results indicate that ERP measures make manifest covert aspects of the priming process occurring in the foreperiod.
An ERP investigation of dichotic repetition priming with temporally overlapping stimuli
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2014
The present study used event-related potentials to examine effects of prime-target repetition using a dichotic priming paradigm. Participants monitored a stream of target words in the right attended ear for occasional animal names, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to non-animal words that were either unrelated to, or a repetition of, prime words presented to the left ear. Prime words were spoken in a different voice and had a lower intensity than target words, and prime word onset began 50 ms before target word onset. Repetition priming effects were observed in the ERPs starting around 150 ms post-target onset, and continued to influence processing for the duration of target stimuli. These priming effects provide further evidence in favor of parallel processing of overlapping dichotic stimuli, at least up to the level of some form of sublexical phonological representation, a likely locus for the integration of the two sources of information.
Brain Research, 2007
The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the time-course of visual word recognition using a masked repetition priming paradigm. In two experiments participants monitored a stream of words for occasional animal names, and ERPs were recorded to non-animal critical target items that were either repetitions or were unrelated to the immediately preceding masked prime word. In Experiment 1 the onset interval between the prime and target (stimulus-onset-asynchrony-SOA) was manipulated across four levels (60, 180, 300 and 420 ms) and the duration of primes was held constant at 40 ms. In Experiment 2 the SOA between the prime and target was held constant at 60 ms and the prime duration was manipulated across four levels (10, 20 30 and 40 ms). Both manipulations were found to have distinct effects on the N250 and N400 ERP components. The results provide converging evidence that the N250 reflects processing at the level of form representations (orthography and phonology) while the N400 reflects processing at the level of meaning.
Biological Psychology, 2007
An attentional blink (AB) paradigm was used to directly compare semantic and repetition priming for reported words versus missed words. Three target words (T1, T2, T3) were embedded in a rapidly presented stream of non-word distractors for report at the end of each trial. Whereas T1 was not related to either T2 or T3, T2 and T3 could be unrelated words, semantically related words, or identical. Semantic and repetition priming effects were evident in both behavioral and electrophysiological measures on T3, whether T2 was accurately reported or 'blinked'. These results suggest that semantic and repetition priming effects, under rapid serial visual presentation conditions, are modulated by at least partially overlapping neural mechanisms. #
Implicit memory within a word recognition task: an event-related potential study in human subjects
Neuroscience Letters, 1999
First, we recorded brain potentials from 15 healthy young subjects during the performance of a word/non-word discrimination task. During continuous visual presentation, some of the meaningful words were repeated after 86±94 s. We found a signi®cant decrease of response time associated with the classi®cation of repeated words which is an index for priming, an unconscious brain process. However, event-related potentials (ERPs) did not differ signi®cantly between ®rst and second presentations. Second, we recorded brain potentials during a following recognition test. Some of the meaningful words which were presented only once during the semantic discrimination task were repeated and had to be discriminated from randomly interspersed new words. We compared ERPs produced by incorrectly classi®ed repeated words (misses) with ERPs produced by correctly classi®ed new words (correct rejections). We found early ERP differences between 250 and 400 ms and later differences starting at about 500 ms after the stimulus onset. The early effect occurred over parietal scalp locations and the later effect over frontal, parietal and occipital scalp locations. This is evidence for unconscious brain activity related to the processing of missed repeated words. We suggest that the later frontal effect we found is due to an enhanced effort of the retrieval of item representations during word recognition and that the earlier parietal effect re¯ects partial recognition. q
Event-related brain potentials evoked by verbs and nouns in a primed lexical decision task
Psychophysiology, 2001
We investigated whether verbs and nouns evoke comparable behavioral and N400 effects in a primed lexical decision task. Twenty-nine students were tested, 13 in a pilot study in which only response times and error rates were collected and 16 in a study in which ERPs were recorded from 124 scalp electrodes. Stimuli were noun-noun and verb-verb pairs with the targets bearing either a strong, a moderate, or no semantic association to the prime or being a pseudoword. Behavioral data revealed comparable priming effects for both word categories. These proved to be independent from the SOA~250 and 800 ms! and they followed the well-known pattern of decreasing response times and error rates with increasing relatedness between target and prime. ERPs revealed pronounced N400 effects for both word categories with a larger amplitude for noun than for verb pairs. A systematic analysis of topographic differences between noun-and verb-evoked ERPs and N400 effects, respectively, gave no convincing support to the hypothesis that the two word categories activate distinct neuronal networks.
PLoS ONE, 2014
This study examines the influence of a button response task on the event-related potential (ERP) in a semantic priming experiment. Of particular interest is the N400 component. In many semantic priming studies, subjects are asked to respond to a stimulus as fast and accurately as possible by pressing a button. Response time (RT) is recorded in parallel with an electroencephalogram (EEG) for ERP analysis. In this case, the response occurs in the time window used for ERP analysis and response-related components may overlap with stimulus-locked ones such as the N400. This has led to a recommendation against such a design, although the issue has not been explored in depth. Since studies keep being published that disregard this issue, a more detailed examination of influence of response-related potentials on the ERP is needed. Two experiments were performed in which subjects pressed one of two buttons with their dominant hand in response to word-pairs with varying association strength (AS), indicating a personal judgement of association between the two words. In the first experiment, subjects were instructed to respond as fast and accurately as possible. In the second experiment, subjects delayed their button response to enforce a one second interval between the onset of the target word and the button response. Results show that in the first experiment a P3 component and motor-related potentials (MRPs) overlap with the N400 component, which can cause a misinterpretation of the latter. In order to study the N400 component, the button response should be delayed to avoid contamination of the ERP with response-related components.