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Sample records for semantic priming task

  1. Subliminal semantic priming in speech.

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    Jérôme Daltrozzo

    Full Text Available Numerous studies have reported subliminal repetition and semantic priming in the visual modality. We transferred this paradigm to the auditory modality. Prime awareness was manipulated by a reduction of sound intensity level. Uncategorized prime words (according to a post-test were followed by semantically related, unrelated, or repeated target words (presented without intensity reduction and participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT. Participants with slower reaction times in the LDT showed semantic priming (faster reaction times for semantically related compared to unrelated targets and negative repetition priming (slower reaction times for repeated compared to semantically related targets. This is the first report of semantic priming in the auditory modality without conscious categorization of the prime.

  2. Priming picture naming with a semantic task: an fMRI investigation.

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    Shiree Heath

    Full Text Available Prior semantic processing can enhance subsequent picture naming performance, yet the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying this effect and its longevity are unknown. This functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined whether different neurological mechanisms underlie short-term (within minutes and long-term (within days facilitation effects from a semantic task in healthy older adults. Both short- and long-term facilitated items were named significantly faster than unfacilitated items, with short-term items significantly faster than long-term items. Region of interest results identified decreased activity for long-term facilitated items compared to unfacilitated and short-term facilitated items in the mid-portion of the middle temporal gyrus, indicating lexical-semantic priming. Additionally, in the whole brain results, increased activity for short-term facilitated items was identified in regions previously linked to episodic memory and object recognition, including the right lingual gyrus (extending to the precuneus region and the left inferior occipital gyrus (extending to the left fusiform region. These findings suggest that distinct neurocognitive mechanisms underlie short- and long-term facilitation of picture naming by a semantic task, with long-term effects driven by lexical-semantic priming and short-term effects by episodic memory and visual object recognition mechanisms.

  3. Why all the confusion? Experimental task explains discrepant semantic priming effects in schizophrenia under "automatic" conditions: evidence from Event-Related Potentials.

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    Kreher, Donna A; Goff, Donald; Kuperberg, Gina R

    2009-06-01

    The schizophrenia research literature contains many differing accounts of semantic memory function in schizophrenia as assessed through the semantic priming paradigm. Most recently, Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) have been used to demonstrate both increased and decreased semantic priming at a neural level in schizophrenia patients, relative to healthy controls. The present study used ERPs to investigate the role of behavioral task in determining neural semantic priming effects in schizophrenia. The same schizophrenia patients and healthy controls completed two experiments in which word stimuli were identical, and the time between the onset of prime and target remained constant at 350 ms: in the first, participants monitored for words within a particular semantic category that appeared only in filler items (implicit task); in the second, participants explicitly rated the relatedness of word-pairs (explicit task). In the explicit task, schizophrenia patients showed reduced direct and indirect semantic priming in comparison with healthy controls. In contrast, in the implicit task, schizophrenia patients showed normal or, in positively thought-disordered patients, increased direct and indirect N400 priming effects compared with healthy controls. These data confirm that, although schizophrenia patients with positive thought disorder may show an abnormally increased automatic spreading activation, the introduction of semantic decision-making can result in abnormally reduced semantic priming in schizophrenia, even when other experimental conditions bias toward automatic processing.

  4. Semantic priming without association: a meta-analytic review.

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    Lucas, M

    2000-12-01

    A meta-analysis of 26 studies indicated that automatic semantic priming can occur without association. Priming did not vary substantially with differences in variables that affect automatic versus strategic processing, such as time spent processing the prime and target, relationship proportion, and task (except that average effects were smaller in the naming task). Although category coordinates were investigated in the majority of studies, synonyms, antonyms, and script relations also demonstrated priming; functional relations showed greater priming, and essential and perceptual relations showed less. The average effect size for semantic priming was smaller than that for associative priming, suggesting that there is an "associative boost" from adding an associative relationship to a semantic one. The implications of these findings for the modularity thesis and for models of semantic priming are discussed.

  5. Preserved semantic priming effect in alexia.

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    Mimura, M; Goodglass, H; Milberg, W

    1996-09-01

    BH, a left-handed patient with alexia and nonfluent aphasia, was presented with a lexical-decision task in which words and pronounceable pseudowords were preceded by semantically related or unrelated picture primes (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, BH was given an explicit reading task using the word lists from Experiment 1. Performance on Experiment 2 disclosed severe reading deficits in both oral reading and semantic matching of the words to pictures. However, in Experiment 1, BH demonstrated a significant semantic priming effect, responding more accurately and more quickly to words preceded by related primes than by unrelated primes. The present results suggest that even in a patient with severe alexia, implicit access to semantic information can be preserved in the absence of explicit identification. The possibility of categorical gradient in implicit activation (living vs. nonliving) in BH was also discussed, which, however, needs to be clarified in the further investigation.

  6. Suggestion-Induced Modulation of Semantic Priming during Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

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    Ulrich, Martin; Kiefer, Markus; Bongartz, Walter; Grön, Georg; Hoenig, Klaus

    2015-01-01

    Using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a primed visual lexical decision task, we investigated the neural and functional mechanisms underlying modulations of semantic word processing through hypnotic suggestions aimed at altering lexical processing of primes. The priming task was to discriminate between target words and pseudowords presented 200 ms after the prime word which was semantically related or unrelated to the target. In a counterbalanced study design, each participant performed the task once at normal wakefulness and once after the administration of hypnotic suggestions to perceive the prime as a meaningless symbol of a foreign language. Neural correlates of priming were defined as significantly lower activations upon semantically related compared to unrelated trials. We found significant suggestive treatment-induced reductions in neural priming, albeit irrespective of the degree of suggestibility. Neural priming was attenuated upon suggestive treatment compared with normal wakefulness in brain regions supporting automatic (fusiform gyrus) and controlled semantic processing (superior and middle temporal gyri, pre- and postcentral gyri, and supplementary motor area). Hence, suggestions reduced semantic word processing by conjointly dampening both automatic and strategic semantic processes. PMID:25923740

  7. Suggestion-Induced Modulation of Semantic Priming during Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

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    Martin Ulrich

    Full Text Available Using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a primed visual lexical decision task, we investigated the neural and functional mechanisms underlying modulations of semantic word processing through hypnotic suggestions aimed at altering lexical processing of primes. The priming task was to discriminate between target words and pseudowords presented 200 ms after the prime word which was semantically related or unrelated to the target. In a counterbalanced study design, each participant performed the task once at normal wakefulness and once after the administration of hypnotic suggestions to perceive the prime as a meaningless symbol of a foreign language. Neural correlates of priming were defined as significantly lower activations upon semantically related compared to unrelated trials. We found significant suggestive treatment-induced reductions in neural priming, albeit irrespective of the degree of suggestibility. Neural priming was attenuated upon suggestive treatment compared with normal wakefulness in brain regions supporting automatic (fusiform gyrus and controlled semantic processing (superior and middle temporal gyri, pre- and postcentral gyri, and supplementary motor area. Hence, suggestions reduced semantic word processing by conjointly dampening both automatic and strategic semantic processes.

  8. The effects of associative and semantic priming in the lexical decision task.

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    Perea, Manuel; Rosa, Eva

    2002-08-01

    Four lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine under which conditions automatic semantic priming effects can be obtained. Experiments 1 and 2 analyzed associative/semantic effects at several very short stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs), whereas Experiments 3 and 4 used a single-presentation paradigm at two response-stimulus intervals (RSIs). Experiment 1 tested associatively related pairs from three semantic categories (synonyms, antonyms, and category coordinates). The results showed reliable associative priming effects at all SOAs. In addition, the correlation between associative strength and magnitude of priming was significant only at the shortest SOA (66 ms). When prime-target pairs were semantically but not associatively related (Experiment 2), reliable priming effects were obtained at SOAs of 83 ms and longer. Using the single-presentation paradigm with a short RSI (200 ms, Experiment 3), the priming effect was equal in size for associative + semantic and for semantic-only pairs (a 21-ms effect). When the RSI was set much longer (1,750 ms, Experiment 4), only the associative + semantic pairs showed a reliable priming effect (23 ms). The results are interpreted in the context of models of semantic memory.

  9. Heterogeneity in semantic priming effect with a lexical decision task in patients after left hemisphere stroke

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    Candice Steffen Holderbaum

    Full Text Available ABSTRACT Investigations on the semantic priming effect (SPE in patients after left hemisphere (LH lesions have shown disparities that may be explained by the variability in performance found among patients. The aim of the present study was to verify the existence of subgroups of patients after LH stroke by searching for dissociations between performance on the lexical decision task based on the semantic priming paradigm and performance on direct memory, semantic association and language tasks. All 17 patients with LH lesions after stroke (ten non-fluent aphasics and seven non aphasics were analyzed individually. Results indicated the presence of three groups of patients according to SPE: one exhibiting SPE at both stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs, one with SPE only at long SOA, and another, larger group with no SPE.

  10. Why all the confusion? Experimental task explains discrepant semantic priming effects in schizophrenia under “automatic” conditions: evidence from Event-Related Potentials

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    Kreher, Donna A.; Goff, Donald; Kuperberg, Gina R.

    2009-01-01

    The schizophrenia research literature contains many differing accounts of semantic memory function in schizophrenia as assessed through the semantic priming paradigm. Most recently, Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) have been used to demonstrate both increased and decreased semantic priming at a neural level in schizophrenia patients, relative to healthy controls. The present study used ERPs to investigate the role of behavioral task in determining neural semantic priming effects in schizophren...

  11. Is Semantic Priming (Ir)rational? Insights from the Speeded Word Fragment Completion Task

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    Heyman, Tom; Hutchison, Keith A.; Storms, Gert

    2016-01-01

    Semantic priming, the phenomenon that a target is recognized faster if it is preceded by a semantically related prime, is a well-established effect. However, the mechanisms producing semantic priming are subject of debate. Several theories assume that the underlying processes are controllable and tuned to prime utility. In contrast, purely…

  12. False memories and lexical decision: even twelve primes do not cause long-term semantic priming.

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    Zeelenberg, René; Pecher, Diane

    2002-03-01

    Semantic priming effects are usually obtained only if the prime is presented shortly before the target stimulus. Recent evidence obtained with the so-called false memory paradigm suggests, however, that in both explicit and implicit memory tasks semantic relations between words can result in long-lasting effects when multiple 'primes' are presented. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether these effects would generalize to lexical decision. In four experiments we showed that even as many as 12 primes do not cause long-term semantic priming. In all experiments, however, a repetition priming effect was obtained. The present results are consistent with a number of other results showing that semantic information plays a minimal role in long-term priming in visual word recognition.

  13. Mechanisms of masked evaluative priming: task sets modulate behavioral and electrophysiological priming for picture and words differentially.

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    Kiefer, Markus; Liegel, Nathalie; Zovko, Monika; Wentura, Dirk

    2017-04-01

    Research with the evaluative priming paradigm has shown that affective evaluation processes reliably influence cognition and behavior, even when triggered outside awareness. However, the precise mechanisms underlying such subliminal evaluative priming effects, response activation vs semantic processing, are matter of a debate. In this study, we determined the relative contribution of semantic processing and response activation to masked evaluative priming with pictures and words. To this end, we investigated the modulation of masked pictorial vs verbal priming by previously activated perceptual vs semantic task sets and assessed the electrophysiological correlates of priming using event-related potential (ERP) recordings. Behavioral and electrophysiological effects showed a differential modulation of pictorial and verbal subliminal priming by previously activated task sets: Pictorial priming was only observed during the perceptual but not during the semantic task set. Verbal priming, in contrast, was found when either task set was activated. Furthermore, only verbal priming was associated with a modulation of the N400 ERP component, an index of semantic processing, whereas a priming-related modulation of earlier ERPs, indexing visuo-motor S-R activation, was found for both picture and words. The results thus demonstrate that different neuro-cognitive processes contribute to unconscious evaluative priming depending on the stimulus format. © The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

  14. Attentional Control and the Relatedness Proportion Effect in Semantic Priming

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    Hutchison, Keith A.

    2007-01-01

    In 2 experiments, participants completed both an attentional control battery (OSPAN, antisaccade, and Stroop tasks) and a modified semantic priming task. The priming task measured relatedness proportion (RP) effects within subjects, with the color of the prime indicating the probability that the to-be-named target would be related. In Experiment…

  15. The impact of auditory white noise on semantic priming.

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    Angwin, Anthony J; Wilson, Wayne J; Copland, David A; Barry, Robert J; Myatt, Grace; Arnott, Wendy L

    2018-04-10

    It has been proposed that white noise can improve cognitive performance for some individuals, particularly those with lower attention, and that this effect may be mediated by dopaminergic circuitry. Given existing evidence that semantic priming is modulated by dopamine, this study investigated whether white noise can facilitate semantic priming. Seventy-eight adults completed an auditory semantic priming task with and without white noise, at either a short or long inter-stimulus interval (ISI). Measures of both direct and indirect semantic priming were examined. Analysis of the results revealed significant direct and indirect priming effects at each ISI in noise and silence, however noise significantly reduced the magnitude of indirect priming. Analyses of subgroups with higher versus lower attention revealed a reduction to indirect priming in noise relative to silence for participants with lower executive and orienting attention. These findings suggest that white noise focuses automatic spreading activation, which may be driven by modulation of dopaminergic circuitry. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  16. The Onset and Time Course of Semantic Priming during Rapid Recognition of Visual Words

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    Hoedemaker, Renske S.; Gordon, Peter C.

    2016-01-01

    In two experiments, we assessed the effects of response latency and task-induced goals on the onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid processing of visual words as revealed by ocular response tasks. In Experiment 1 (Ocular Lexical Decision Task), participants performed a lexical decision task using eye-movement responses on a sequence of four words. In Experiment 2, the same words were encoded for an episodic recognition memory task that did not require a meta-linguistic judgment. For both tasks, survival analyses showed that the earliest-observable effect (Divergence Point or DP) of semantic priming on target-word reading times occurred at approximately 260 ms, and ex-Gaussian distribution fits revealed that the magnitude of the priming effect increased as a function of response time. Together, these distributional effects of semantic priming suggest that the influence of the prime increases when target processing is more effortful. This effect does not require that the task include a metalinguistic judgment; manipulation of the task goals across experiments affected the overall response speed but not the location of the DP or the overall distributional pattern of the priming effect. These results are more readily explained as the result of a retrospective rather than a prospective priming mechanism and are consistent with compound-cue models of semantic priming. PMID:28230394

  17. Lack of semantic priming effects in famous person recognition in Mild Cognitive Impairment.

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    Brambati, Simona M; Peters, Frédéric; Belleville, Sylvie; Joubert, Sven

    2012-04-01

    Growing evidence indicates that individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) manifest semantic deficits that are often more severe for items that are characterized by a unique semantic and lexical association, such as famous people and famous buildings, than common concepts, such as objects. However, it is still controversial whether the semantic deficits observed in MCI are determined by a degradation of semantic information or by a deficit in intentional access to semantic knowledge. Here we used a semantic priming task in order to assess the integrity of the semantic system without requiring explicit access to this system. This paradigm may provide new insights in clarifying the nature of the semantic deficits in MCI. We assessed the semantic and repetition priming effect in 13 individuals with MCI and 13 age-matched controls who engaged in a familiarity judgment task of famous names. In the semantic priming condition, the prime was the name of a member of the same occupation category as the target (Tom Cruise-Brad Pitt), while in the repetition priming condition the prime was the same name as the target (Charlie Chaplin-Charlie Chaplin). The results showed a defective priming effect in MCI in the semantic but not in the repetition priming condition. Specifically, when compared to controls, MCI patients did not show a facilitation effect in responding to the same occupation prime-target pairs, but they showed an equivalent facilitation effect when the target was the same name as the prime. The present results provide support to the hypothesis that the semantic impairments observed in MCI cannot be uniquely ascribed to a deficit in intentional access to semantic information. Instead, these findings point to the semantic nature of these deficits and, in particular, to a degraded representation of semantic information concerning famous people. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved.

  18. Semantic priming effects of synonyms, antonyms, frame, implication and verb-object categories

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    Elsa Skënderi-Rakipllari

    2017-12-01

    Full Text Available Semantic priming has been a major subject of interest for psycholinguists, whose aim is to discover how lexical memory is structured and organized. The facilitation process of word retrieval through semantic priming has long been studied. The present research is aimed to reveal which semantic category has the best priming effect. Through a lexical decision task experiment we compared the reaction times of masked primed pairs and unprimed pairs. In addition, we analyzed the reaction times and priming effect of connected semantic relations: antonymy, frame, synonymy, implication and verb-object. The data collected and interpreted unveiled that the mean reaction times of primed pairs were shorter than those of unprimed pairs. As to semantic priming, the most significantly primed pairs were those of implications and verb- objects, and not those of synonymy or antonymy as it might be expected.

  19. Long-term repetition priming and semantic interference in a lexical-semantic matching task: tapping the links between object names and colors.

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    Lloyd-Jones, Toby J; Nakabayashi, Kazuyo

    2014-01-01

    Using a novel paradigm to engage the long-term mappings between object names and the prototypical colors for objects, we investigated the retrieval of object-color knowledge as indexed by long-term priming (the benefit in performance from a prior encounter with the same or a similar stimulus); a process about which little is known. We examined priming from object naming on a lexical-semantic matching task. In the matching task participants encountered a visually presented object name (Experiment 1) or object shape (Experiment 2) paired with either a color patch or color name. The pairings could either match whereby both were consistent with a familiar object (e.g., strawberry and red) or mismatch (strawberry and blue). We used the matching task to probe knowledge about familiar objects and their colors pre-activated during object naming. In particular, we examined whether the retrieval of object-color information was modality-specific and whether this influenced priming. Priming varied with the nature of the retrieval process: object-color priming arose for object names but not object shapes and beneficial effects of priming were observed for color patches whereas inhibitory priming arose with color names. These findings have implications for understanding how object knowledge is retrieved from memory and modified by learning.

  20. Long-term repetition priming and semantic interference in a lexical-semantic matching task: Tapping the links between object names and colours

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    Toby Jonathan Lloyd-Jones

    2014-06-01

    Full Text Available Using a novel paradigm to engage the long-term mappings between object names and the prototypical colours for objects, we investigated the retrieval of object-colour knowledge as indexed by long-term priming (the benefit in performance from a prior encounter with the same or a similar stimulus; a process about which little is known. We examined priming from object naming on a lexical-semantic matching task. In the matching task participants encountered a visually presented object name (Experiment 1 or object shape (Experiment 2 paired with either a colour patch or colour name. The pairings could either match whereby both were consistent with a familiar object (e.g., strawberry and red or mismatch (strawberry and blue. We used the matching task to probe knowledge about familiar objects and their colours pre-activated during object naming. In particular, we examined whether the retrieval of object-colour information was modality-specific and whether this influenced priming. Priming varied with the nature of the retrieval process: object-colour priming arose for object names but not object shapes and beneficial effects of priming were observed for colour patches whereas inhibitory priming arose with colour names. These findings have implications for understanding how object knowledge is retrieved from memory and modified by learning.

  1. Comparison between Phonological Priming and Semantic Priming in the Short Verbal Memory Span in Male 18-25

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    Davood Sobhani Rad

    2007-06-01

    Full Text Available Background and Aim: The short-term memory (STM has been studied to a great extent so far. Using some strategies and techniques to help the subject to access to his/her memory is important for Speech pathologist. Priming is a process that increases the chance of accessing to some information of memory by means of some simulations. So, primings are some words which facilitate the retrieval of the target words. The purpose of this study is comparing phonological and semantic priming on the short verbal memory span.Materials and Methods: The research was conducted on sixty-four 18-25 year-old male students in Tehran University of Medical sciences. Due to some distortion factors, including bilingualism, stutter-ing, and articulation problem, that can effect the reaction time, were determined as exclusion critenia. In additiion, subjects with difficulty in Wepman auditory discrimination were ruled out. The test was performed via the second version of programmed DMDX software and reaction time was recorded.Results: Semantic tasks and rhyming tasks were retrieved faster than the other tasks in lexical access respectively. There was a significant difference between the semantic and rime tasks but there is no significant difference between alliteration and unrelated tasks.Conclusion: The result of this research indicates that the semantic level is activated faster than the other levels and the phonological level is activated right after that. The alliteration level is the last level that activated. It has some similarities with some other investigations on the reaction time in phono-logical tasks.

  2. The neural substrates of semantic memory deficits in early Alzheimer's disease: Clues from semantic priming effects and FDG-PET

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    Giffard, B.; Laisney, M.; Mezenge, F.; De la Sayette, V.; Eustache, F.; Desgranges, B.

    2008-01-01

    The neural substrates responsible for semantic dysfunction during the early stages of AD have yet to be clearly identified. After a brief overview of the literature on normal and pathological semantic memory, we describe a new approach, designed to provide fresh insights into semantic deficits in AD. We mapped the correlations between resting-state brain glucose utilisation measured by FDG-PET and semantic priming scores in a group of 17 AD patients. The priming task, which yields a particularly pure measurement of semantic memory, was composed of related pairs of words sharing an attribute relationship (e.g. tiger-stripe). The priming scores correlated positively with the metabolism of the superior temporal areas on both sides, especially the right side, and this correlation was shown to be specific to the semantic priming effect.This pattern of results is discussed in the light of recent theoretical models of semantic memory, and suggests that a dysfunction of the right superior temporal cortex may contribute to early semantic deficits, characterised by the loss of specific features of concepts in AD. (authors)

  3. Category Priming in the Lexical Decision Task and Evidence of Repetition Effects.

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    Sanza, James

    Semantic priming is the process by which a subject performing a lexical decision task is prepared for a target word through the presentation of a semantically related word. Repetition of a given word at specific intervals is one form of priming that has been shown to reduce subject reaction time in word recognition tasks. A study was conducted to…

  4. Masked and unmasked priming effects as a function of semantic relatedness and associative strength.

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    Sánchez-Casas, Rosa; Ferré, Pilar; Demestre, Josep; García-Chico, Teófilo; García-Albea, José E

    2012-11-01

    The study presented in this paper aimed to investigate the pattern of semantic priming effects, under masked and unmasked conditions, in the lexical decision task, manipulating type of semantic relation and associative strength. Three different kinds of word relations were examined in two experiments: only-semantically related words [e.g., codo (elbow)-rodilla (knee)] and semantic/associative related words with strong [e.g., mesa (table)-silla (chair) and weak association strength [e.g., sapo (toad)-rana (frog)]. In Experiment 1 a masked priming procedure was used with a prime duration of 56 ms, and in Experiment 2, the prime was presented unmasked for 150 ms. The results showed that there were masked priming effects with strong associates, but no evidence of these effects was found with weak associates or only-semantic related word pairs. When the prime was presented unmasked, the three types of relations produced significant priming effects and they were not influenced by association strength.

  5. The structure of semantic person memory: evidence from semantic priming in person recognition.

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    Wiese, Holger

    2011-11-01

    This paper reviews research on the structure of semantic person memory as examined with semantic priming. In this experimental paradigm, a familiarity decision on a target face or written name is usually faster when it is preceded by a related as compared to an unrelated prime. This effect has been shown to be relatively short lived and susceptible to interfering items. Moreover, semantic priming can cross stimulus domains, such that a written name can prime a target face and vice versa. However, it remains controversial whether representations of people are stored in associative networks based on co-occurrence, or in more abstract semantic categories. In line with prominent cognitive models of face recognition, which explain semantic priming by shared semantic information between prime and target, recent research demonstrated that priming could be obtained from purely categorically related, non-associated prime/target pairs. Although strategic processes, such as expectancy and retrospective matching likely contribute, there is also evidence for a non-strategic contribution to priming, presumably related to spreading activation. Finally, a semantic priming effect has been demonstrated in the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, which may reflect facilitated access to semantic information. It is concluded that categorical relatedness is one organizing principle of semantic person memory. ©2011 The British Psychological Society.

  6. The influence of valence and arousal on reasoning: Affective priming in the semantic verification task

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    Orlić Ana

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available The aim of the present study was to examine the effects of affective valence and arousal on the reasoning process. Reasoning was measured using a semantic verification task and the influence of valence and arousal was tracked using the affective priming paradigm. Primes were photographs varied on two dimensions - emotional valence (positive, neutral, negative and arousal (high, low. Forty-nine psychology students participated in the experiment. Results showed that reaction time needed for semantic verification was significantly faster for positive-high arousing in comparison to positive-low arousing condition and for neutral high arousing in comparison to neutral-low arousing condition, but there were no significant differences in negative low and high arousing conditions. Also, significant differences were found among all three valences in high arousing conditions and there were no such differences in low arousing conditions. These results reveal the importance of both arousal and valence in the research on the influence of emotions on the reasoning process. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 179033

  7. Semantic context effects and priming in word association.

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    Zeelenberg, René; Pecher, Diane; Shiffrin, Richard M; Raaijmakers, Jeroen G W

    2003-09-01

    Two experiments investigated priming in word association, an implicit memory task. In the study phase of Experiment 1, semantically ambiguous target words were presented in sentences that biased their interpretation. The appropriate interpretation of the target was either congruent or incongruent with the cue presented in a subsequent word association task. Priming (i.e., a higher proportion of target responses relative to a nonstudied baseline) was obtained for the congruent condition, but not for the incongruent condition. In Experiment 2, study sentences emphasized particular meaning aspects of nonambiguous targets. The word association task showed a higher proportion of target responses for targets studied in the more congruent sentence context than for targets studied in the less congruent sentence context. These results indicate that priming in word association depends largely on the storage of information relating the cue and target.

  8. The neural substrates of semantic memory deficits in early Alzheimer's disease: Clues from semantic priming effects and FDG-PET

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    Giffard, B.; Laisney, M.; Mezenge, F.; De la Sayette, V.; Eustache, F.; Desgranges, B. [Univ Caen Basse Normandie, INSERM, U923, Unite Rech, EPHE, Lab Neuropsychol, CHU Cote Nacre, GIP Cyceron, F-14033 Caen (France)

    2008-07-01

    The neural substrates responsible for semantic dysfunction during the early stages of AD have yet to be clearly identified. After a brief overview of the literature on normal and pathological semantic memory, we describe a new approach, designed to provide fresh insights into semantic deficits in AD. We mapped the correlations between resting-state brain glucose utilisation measured by FDG-PET and semantic priming scores in a group of 17 AD patients. The priming task, which yields a particularly pure measurement of semantic memory, was composed of related pairs of words sharing an attribute relationship (e.g. tiger-stripe). The priming scores correlated positively with the metabolism of the superior temporal areas on both sides, especially the right side, and this correlation was shown to be specific to the semantic priming effect.This pattern of results is discussed in the light of recent theoretical models of semantic memory, and suggests that a dysfunction of the right superior temporal cortex may contribute to early semantic deficits, characterised by the loss of specific features of concepts in AD. (authors)

  9. Semantic transparency affects morphological priming . . . eventually.

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    Heyer, Vera; Kornishova, Dana

    2018-05-01

    Semantic transparency has been in the focus of psycholinguistic research for decades, with the controversy about the time course of the application of morpho-semantic information during the processing of morphologically complex words not yet resolved. This study reports two masked priming studies with English - ness and Russian - ost' nominalisations, investigating how semantic transparency modulates native speakers' morphological priming effects at short and long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In both languages, we found increased morphological priming for nominalisations at the transparent end of the scale (e.g. paleness - pale) in comparison to items at the opaque end of the scale (e.g. business - busy) but only at longer prime durations. The present findings are in line with models that posit an initial phase of morpho-orthographic (semantically blind) decomposition.

  10. Semantic Priming for Coordinate Distant Concepts in Alzheimer's Disease Patients

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    Perri, R.; Zannino, G. D.; Caltagirone, C.; Carlesimo, G. A.

    2011-01-01

    Semantic priming paradigms have been used to investigate semantic knowledge in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). While priming effects produced by prime-target pairs with associative relatedness reflect processes at both lexical and semantic levels, priming effects produced by words that are semantically related but not associated should…

  11. Lateralized direct and indirect semantic priming effects in subjects with paranormal experiences and beliefs.

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    Pizzagalli, D; Lehmann, D; Brugger, P

    2001-01-01

    The present investigation tested the hypothesis that, as an aspect of schizotypal thinking, the formation of paranormal beliefs was related to spreading activation characteristics within semantic networks. From a larger student population (n = 117) prescreened for paranormal belief, 12 strong believers and 12 strong disbelievers (all women) were invited for a lateralized semantic priming task with directly and indirectly related prime-target pairs. Believers showed stronger indirect (but not direct) semantic priming effects than disbelievers after left (but not right) visual field stimulation, indicating faster appreciation of distant semantic relations specifically by the right hemisphere, reportedly specialized in coarse rather than focused semantic processing. These results are discussed in the light of recent findings in schizophrenic patients with thought disorders. They suggest that a disinhibition with semantic networks may underlie the formation of paranormal belief. The potential usefulness of work with healthy subjects for neuropsychiatric research is stressed. Copyright 2001 S. Karger AG, Basel

  12. Combining the Post-Cue Task and the Perceptual Identification Task to Assess Parallel Activation and Mutual Facilitation of Related Primes and Targets.

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    Scherer, Demian; Wentura, Dirk

    2018-03-01

    Recent theories assume a mutual facilitation in case of semantic overlap for concepts being activated simultaneously. We provide evidence for this claim using a semantic priming paradigm. To test for mutual facilitation of related concepts, a perceptual identification task was employed, presenting prime-target pairs briefly and masked, with an SOA of 0 ms (i.e., prime and target were presented concurrently, one above the other). Participants were instructed to identify the target. In Experiment 1, a cue defining the target was presented at stimulus onset, whereas in Experiment 2 the cue was not presented before the offset of stimuli. Accordingly, in Experiment 2, a post-cue task was merged with the perceptual identification task. We obtained significant semantic priming effects in both experiments. This result is compatible with the view that two concepts can both be activated in parallel and can mutually facilitate each other if they are related.

  13. Priming semantico e museografia / Semantic priming and museography

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    Annalisa Banzi

    2012-05-01

    Full Text Available Il priming è una tipologia di memoria implicita che facilita l’apprendimento di stimoli di diversa natura (stimoli visivi, semantici, etc.. Un allestimento museale che adotti strumenti basati sul priming potrebbe aiutare il pubblico a selezionare i contenuti relativi agli oggetti esposti. In questo articolo viene descritta l’applicazione del priming semantico allo spazio museale. Questa operazione in prima battutta potrebbe essere letta come una mancanza di fiducia nelle capacità cognitive del visitatore nel discriminare il significato delle informazioni. In realtà è una forma di sostegno per aiutare il visitatore a sviluppare gradualmente una propria metodologia di approccio ai contenuti proposti nel museo. Grazie al priming, il pubblico riceve una serie di stimoli che possono aiutare a costituire la base delle proprie conoscenze in ambito storico-artistico ed essere il punto di partenza sul quale costruire un metodo critico.   Many psychological aspects such as motivation, emotion, and attention, affect human learning. Among these, priming triggers and tunes implicit memory processes. Hence the goal of this paper is to check whether semantic priming can be used as an effective tool to design a supportive museum environment where people can easily learn. Moreover, the resulting stronger and more persistent memories could encourage museum visitors to learn more and better, and to develop a method to “read” the artworks. After a brief overview of current models of semantic priming, practical and theoretical issues are considered and discussed.

  14. The modulatory influence of the functional COMT Val158Met polymorphism on lexical decisions and semantic priming.

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    Reuter, Martin; Montag, Christian; Peters, Kristina; Kocher, Anne; Kiefer, Markus

    2009-01-01

    The role of the prefrontal Cortex (PFC) in higher cognitive functions - including working memory, conflict resolution, set shifting and semantic processing - has been demonstrated unequivocally. Despite the great heterogeneity among tasks measuring these phenotypes, due in part to the different cognitive sub-processes implied and the specificity of the stimulus material used, there is agreement that all of these tasks recruit an executive control system located in the PFC. On a biochemical level it is known that the dopaminergic system plays an important role in executive control functions. Evidence comes from molecular genetics relating the functional COMT Val158Met polymorphism to working memory and set shifting. In order determine whether this pattern of findings generalises to linguistic and semantic processing, we investigated the effects of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism in lexical decision making using masked and unmasked versions of the semantic priming paradigm on N = 104 healthy subjects. Although we observed strong priming effects in all conditions (masked priming, unmasked priming with short/long stimulus asynchronies (SOAs), direct and indirect priming), COMT was not significantly related to priming, suggesting no reliable influence on semantic processing. However, COMT Val158Met was strongly associated with lexical decision latencies in all priming conditions if considered separately, explaining between 9 and 14.5% of the variance. Therefore, the findings indicate that COMT mainly influences more general executive control functions in the PFC supporting the speed of lexical decisions.

  15. The modulatory influence of the functional COMT Val158Met polymorphism on lexical decisions and semantic priming

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    Martin Reuter

    2009-08-01

    Full Text Available The role of the prefrontal Cortex (PFC in higher cognitive functions - including working memory, conflict resolution, set shifting and semantic processing - has been demonstrated unequivocally. Despite the great heterogeneity among tasks measuring these phenotypes, due in part to the different cognitive sub-processes implied and the specificity of the stimulus material used, there is agreement that all of these tasks recruit an executive control system located in the PFC. On a biochemical level it is known that the dopaminergic system plays an important role in executive control functions. Evidence comes from molecular genetics relating the functional COMT Val158Met polymorphism to working memory and set shifting. In order determine whether this pattern of findings generalises to linguistic and semantic processing, we investigated the effects of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism in lexical decision making using masked and unmasked versions of the semantic priming paradigm on N=104 healthy subjects. Although we observed strong priming effects in all conditions (masked priming, unmasked priming with short/long stimulus asynchronies (SOAs, direct and indirect priming, COMT was not significantly related to masked priming, suggesting no reliable influence on semantic processing. However, COMT Val158Met was strongly associated with lexical decision latencies in all priming conditions if considered separately, explaining between 9 to 14.5 % of the variance. Therefore, the findings indicate that COMT mainly influences more general executive control functions in the PFC supporting the speed of lexical decisions.

  16. Effects of task structure on category priming in patients with Parkinson's disease and in healthy individuals.

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    Brown, Gregory G; Brown, Sandra J; Christenson, Gina; Williams, Rebecca E; Kindermann, Sandra S; Loftis, Christopher; Olsen, Ryan; Siple, Patricia; Shults, Clifford; Gorell, Jay M

    2002-05-01

    Lexical decision tasks have been used to study both shifts of attention and semantic processing in Parkinson's Disease (PD). Whereas other laboratories have reported normal levels of semantic priming among PD patients, our laboratory has reported abnormally large levels. In this study, two experiments were performed to determine the influence of task structure on the extent of semantic priming during lexical decision-making and pronunciation tasks among PD patients and neurologically healthy controls. In Experiment 1, the effect of Prime Dominance (the ratio of category to neutral trials) on lexical decision-making was studied. Although equal numbers of word and nonword trials were presented, half of the PD patients and controls were studied under Category Prime Dominance (category : neutral prime ratio of 2:1) and half were studied under Neutral Prime Dominance (category : neutral prime ratio of 1:2). In Experiment 2, PD and control participants were studied on lexical decision-making and pronunciation tasks where twice as many words as nonword trials were presented, consistent with other studies from our laboratory. In Experiment 1, we found no group differences in the magnitude of priming and no effect of Prime Dominance. Moreover, the findings were similar in pattern and magnitude to results published by Neely (1977). In Experiment 2, we observed larger priming effects among PD patients than among controls, but only on the lexical decision (LD) task. These results support the hypothesis that abnormally large category-priming effects appear in LD studies of PD patients when the number of word trials exceeds the number of nonword trials. Furthermore, increased lexical priming in PD appears to be due to processes operating during the decision-making period that follows presentation of the lexical target.

  17. Semantic priming, not repetition priming, is to blame for false hearing.

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    Rogers, Chad S

    2017-08-01

    Contextual and sensory information are combined in speech perception. Conflict between the two can lead to false hearing, defined as a high-confidence misidentification of a spoken word. Rogers, Jacoby, and Sommers (Psychology and Aging, 27(1), 33-45, 2012) found that older adults are more susceptible to false hearing than are young adults, using a combination of semantic priming and repetition priming to create context. In this study, the type of context (repetition vs. sematic priming) responsible for false hearing was examined. Older and young adult participants read and listened to a list of paired associates (e.g., ROW-BOAT) and were told to remember the pairs for a later memory test. Following the memory test, participants identified words masked in noise that were preceded by a cue word in the clear. Targets were semantically associated to the cue (e.g., ROW-BOAT), unrelated to the cue (e.g., JAW-PASS), or phonologically related to a semantic associate of the cue (e.g., ROW-GOAT). How often each cue word and its paired associate were presented prior to the memory test was manipulated (0, 3, or 5 times) to test effects of repetition priming. Results showed repetitions had no effect on rates of context-based listening or false hearing. However, repetition did significantly increase sensory information as a basis for metacognitive judgments in young and older adults. This pattern suggests that semantic priming dominates as the basis for false hearing and highlights context and sensory information operating as qualitatively different bases for listening and metacognition.

  18. Feature activation during word recognition: action, visual, and associative-semantic priming effects

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    Kevin J.Y. Lam

    2015-05-01

    Full Text Available Embodied theories of language postulate that language meaning is stored in modality-specific brain areas generally involved in perception and action in the real world. However, the temporal dynamics of the interaction between modality-specific information and lexical-semantic processing remain unclear. We investigated the relative timing at which two types of modality-specific information (action-based and visual-form information contribute to lexical-semantic comprehension. To this end, we applied a behavioral priming paradigm in which prime and target words were related with respect to (1 action features, (2 visual features, or (3 semantically associative information. Using a Go/No-Go lexical decision task, priming effects were measured across four different inter-stimulus intervals (ISI = 100 ms, 250 ms, 400 ms, and 1,000 ms to determine the relative time course of the different features . Notably, action priming effects were found in ISIs of 100 ms, 250 ms, and 1,000 ms whereas a visual priming effect was seen only in the ISI of 1,000 ms. Importantly, our data suggest that features follow different time courses of activation during word recognition. In this regard, feature activation is dynamic, measurable in specific time windows but not in others. Thus the current study (1 demonstrates how multiple ISIs can be used within an experiment to help chart the time course of feature activation and (2 provides new evidence for embodied theories of language.

  19. A dual task priming investigation of right hemisphere inhibition for people with left hemisphere lesions

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    Smith-Conway Erin R

    2012-03-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background During normal semantic processing, the left hemisphere (LH is suggested to restrict right hemisphere (RH performance via interhemispheric suppression. However, a lesion in the LH or the use of concurrent tasks to overload the LH's attentional resource balance has been reported to result in RH disinhibition with subsequent improvements in RH performance. The current study examines variations in RH semantic processing in the context of unilateral LH lesions and the manipulation of the interhemispheric processing resource balance, in order to explore the relevance of RH disinhibition to hemispheric contributions to semantic processing following a unilateral LH lesion. Methods RH disinhibition was examined for nine participants with a single LH lesion and 13 matched controls using the dual task paradigm. Hemispheric performance on a divided visual field lexical decision semantic priming task was compared over three verbal memory load conditions, of zero-, two- and six-words. Related stimuli consisted of categorically related, associatively related, and categorically and associatively related prime-target pairs. Response time and accuracy data were recorded and analyzed using linear mixed model analysis, and planned contrasts were performed to compare priming effects in both visual fields, for each of the memory load conditions. Results Control participants exhibited significant bilateral visual field priming for all related conditions (p Conclusions The results from the control group are consistent with suggestions of an age related hemispheric asymmetry reduction and indicate that in healthy aging compensatory bilateral activation may reduce the impact of inhibition. In comparison, the results for the LHD group indicate that following a LH lesion RH semantic processing can be manipulated and enhanced by the introduction of a verbal memory task designed to engage LH resources and allow disinhibition of RH processing.

  20. Does a Working Memory Load Really Influence Semantic Priming? A Self-replication Attempt

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    Tom Heyman

    2017-08-01

    Full Text Available The present paper describes two attempts to replicate a recent study of ours in the semantic priming domain (Heyman, Van Rensbergen, Storms, Hutchison, & De Deyne, 2015. In that study, we observed that semantic priming for forward associates (e.g., 'panda-bear' completely evaporated when participants’ working memory was taxed, whereas backward (e.g., 'baby-stork' and symmetric associates (e.g., 'cat-dog' showed no ill-effects of a secondary task. This was the case for relatively long and short stimulus onset asynchronies (i.e., 1,200 ms and 200 ms, respectively. The results thus suggested that prospective target activation is, contrary to what some theories of semantic memory posit, not an automatic process. However, the two replication studies reported here cast serious doubt on this conclusion. A Bayesian analysis of all the available data indicated that there is at least substantial evidence for a priming effect in every condition, except for forward associates in the short SOA condition. The null hypothesis is still supported in the latter condition, though the replication studies weakened the evidence for a null effect. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

  1. Partial sleep deprivation does not alter processes involved in semantic word priming: event-related potential evidence.

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    Tavakoli, Paniz; Muller-Gass, Alexandra; Campbell, Kenneth

    2015-03-01

    Sleep deprivation has generally been observed to have a detrimental effect on tasks that require sustained attention for successful performance. It might however be possible to counter these effects by altering cognitive strategies. A recent semantic word priming study indicated that subjects used an effortful predictive-expectancy search of semantic memory following normal sleep, but changed to an automatic, effortless strategy following total sleep deprivation. Partial sleep deprivation occurs much more frequently than total sleep deprivation. The present study therefore employed a similar priming task following either 4h of sleep or following normal sleep. The purpose of the study was to determine whether partial sleep deprivation would also lead to a shift in cognitive strategy to compensate for an inability to sustain attention and effortful processing necessary for using the predicative expectancy strategy. Sixteen subjects were presented with word pairs, a prime and a target that were either strongly semantically associated (cat...dog), weakly associated (cow...barn) or not associated (apple...road). The subject's task was to determine if the target word was semantically associated to the prime. A strong priming effect was observed in both conditions. RTs were slower, accuracy lower, and N400 larger to unassociated targets, independent of the amount of sleep. The overall N400 did not differ as a function of sleep. The scalp distribution of the N400 was also similar following both normal sleep and sleep loss. There was thus little evidence of a difference in the processing of the target stimulus as a function of the amount sleep. Similarly, ERPs in the period between the onset of the prime and the subsequent target also did not differ between the normal sleep and sleep loss conditions. In contrast to total sleep deprivation, subjects therefore appeared to use a common predictive expectancy strategy in both conditions. This strategy does however require an

  2. Response-related potentials during semantic priming: the effect of a speeded button response task on ERPs.

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    Marijn van Vliet

    Full Text Available 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.

  3. Homophonic and semantic priming of Japanese Kanji words: a time course study.

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    Chen, Hsi-Chin; Yamauchi, Takashi; Tamaoka, Katsuo; Vaid, Jyotsna

    2007-02-01

    In an examination of the time course of activation of phonological and semantic information in processing kanji script, two lexical decision experiments were conducted with native readers of Japanese. Kanji targets were preceded at short (85-msec) and long (150-msec) intervals by homophonic, semantically related, or unrelated primes presented in kanji (Experiment 1) or by hiragana transcriptions of the kanji primes (Experiment 2). When primes were in kanji, semantic relatedness facilitated kanji target recognition at both intervals but homophonic relatedness did not. When primes were in hiragana, kanji target recognition was facilitated by homophonic relatedness at both intervals and by semantic relatedness only at the longer interval. The absence of homophonic priming of kanji targets by kanji primes challenges the universal phonology principle's claim that phonology is central to accessing meaning from print. The stimuli used in the present study may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

  4. Priming in Episodic and Semantic Memory.

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    McKoon, Gail; Ratcliff, Roger

    1979-01-01

    Four experiments examined priming between newly learned paired associates through two procedures, lexical decision and item recognition. Results argue against a functional separation of the semantic and episodic memory systems. (Author/AM)

  5. Semantic and translation priming from a first language to a second and back: Making sense of the findings.

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    Schoonbaert, Sofie; Duyck, Wouter; Brysbaert, Marc; Hartsuiker, Robert J

    2009-07-01

    The present study investigated cross-language priming effects with unique noncognate translation pairs. Unbalanced Dutch (first language [L1])-English (second language [L2]) bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in a masked priming paradigm. The results of two experiments showed significant translation priming from L1 to L2 (meisje-girl) and from L2 to L1 (girl-meisje), using two different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (250 and 100 msec). Although translation priming from L1 to L2 was significantly stronger than priming from L2 to L1, the latter was significant as well. Two further experiments with the same word targets showed significant cross-language semantic priming in both directions (jongen [boy]-girl; boy-meisje [girl]) and for both SOAs. These data suggest that L1 and L2 are represented by means of a similar lexico-semantic architecture in which L2 words are also able to rapidly activate semantic information, although to a lesser extent than L1 words are able to. This is consistent with models assuming quantitative rather than qualitative differences between L1 and L2 representations.

  6. Priming semantic concepts affects the dynamics of aesthetic appreciation.

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    Faerber, Stella J; Leder, Helmut; Gerger, Gernot; Carbon, Claus-Christian

    2010-10-01

    Aesthetic appreciation (AA) plays an important role for purchase decisions, for the appreciation of art and even for the selection of potential mates. It is known that AA is highly reliable in single assessments, but over longer periods of time dynamic changes of AA may occur. We measured AA as a construct derived from the literature through attractiveness, arousal, interestingness, valence, boredom and innovativeness. By means of the semantic network theory we investigated how the priming of AA-relevant semantic concepts impacts the dynamics of AA of unfamiliar product designs (car interiors) that are known to be susceptible to triggering such effects. When participants were primed for innovativeness, strong dynamics were observed, especially when the priming involved additional AA-relevant dimensions. This underlines the relevance of priming of specific semantic networks not only for the cognitive processing of visual material in terms of selective perception or specific representation, but also for the affective-cognitive processing in terms of the dynamics of aesthetic processing. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  7. Subliminal semantic priming changes the dynamic causal influence between the left frontal and temporal cortex.

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    Matsumoto, Atsushi; Kakigi, Ryusuke

    2014-01-01

    Recent neuroimaging experiments have revealed that subliminal priming of a target stimulus leads to the reduction of neural activity in specific regions concerned with processing the target. Such findings lead to questions about the degree to which the subliminal priming effect is based only on decreased activity in specific local brain regions, as opposed to the influence of neural mechanisms that regulate communication between brain regions. To address this question, this study recorded EEG during performance of a subliminal semantic priming task. We adopted an information-based approach that used independent component analysis and multivariate autoregressive modeling. Results indicated that subliminal semantic priming caused significant modulation of alpha band activity in the left inferior frontal cortex and modulation of gamma band activity in the left inferior temporal regions. The multivariate autoregressive approach confirmed significant increases in information flow from the inferior frontal cortex to inferior temporal regions in the early time window that was induced by subliminal priming. In the later time window, significant enhancement of bidirectional causal flow between these two regions underlying subliminal priming was observed. Results suggest that unconscious processing of words influences not only local activity of individual brain regions but also the dynamics of neural communication between those regions.

  8. Development of lexical-semantic language system: N400 priming effect for spoken words in 18- and 24-month old children.

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    Rämä, Pia; Sirri, Louah; Serres, Josette

    2013-04-01

    Our aim was to investigate whether developing language system, as measured by a priming task for spoken words, is organized by semantic categories. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a priming task for spoken words in 18- and 24-month-old monolingual French learning children. Spoken word pairs were either semantically related (e.g., train-bike) or unrelated (e.g., chicken-bike). The results showed that the N400-like priming effect occurred in 24-month-olds over the right parietal-occipital recording sites. In 18-month-olds the effect was observed similarly to 24-month-olds only in those children with higher word production ability. The results suggest that words are categorically organized in the mental lexicon of children at the age of 2 years and even earlier in children with a high vocabulary. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  9. Is semantic priming due to association strength or feature overlap? A microanalytic review.

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    Hutchison, Keith A

    2003-12-01

    In a recent meta-analysis, Lucas (2000) concluded that there is strong evidence of an overall pure semantic priming effect but no evidence of priming based purely on association. In the present review, I critically examine the individual studies claiming evidence of featural and associative relations in semantic memory. The most important conclusion is that automatic priming appears to be due to both association strength and feature overlap. Mediated associates provide the strongest evidence of automatic associative priming, whereas functional associates, synonyms, and antonyms instead support priming based on feature overlap. In contrast, automatic priming does not occur for category coordinates or perceptually similar items, at least when presented in the visual modality. The status of other relations, such as collocates, episodic relatives, and script relations, is unclear and requires further experimentation. Implications for current models of semantic representation and priming are discussed.

  10. Somatotopic Semantic Priming and Prediction in the Motor System

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    Grisoni, Luigi; Dreyer, Felix R.; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

    2016-01-01

    The recognition of action-related sounds and words activates motor regions, reflecting the semantic grounding of these symbols in action information; in addition, motor cortex exerts causal influences on sound perception and language comprehension. However, proponents of classic symbolic theories still dispute the role of modality-preferential systems such as the motor cortex in the semantic processing of meaningful stimuli. To clarify whether the motor system carries semantic processes, we investigated neurophysiological indexes of semantic relationships between action-related sounds and words. Event-related potentials revealed that action-related words produced significantly larger stimulus-evoked (Mismatch Negativity-like) and predictive brain responses (Readiness Potentials) when presented in body-part-incongruent sound contexts (e.g., “kiss” in footstep sound context; “kick” in whistle context) than in body-part-congruent contexts, a pattern reminiscent of neurophysiological correlates of semantic priming. Cortical generators of the semantic relatedness effect were localized in areas traditionally associated with semantic memory, including left inferior frontal cortex and temporal pole, and, crucially, in motor areas, where body-part congruency of action sound–word relationships was indexed by a somatotopic pattern of activation. As our results show neurophysiological manifestations of action-semantic priming in the motor cortex, they prove semantic processing in the motor system and thus in a modality-preferential system of the human brain. PMID:26908635

  11. Influence of auditory spatial attention on cross-modal semantic priming effect: evidence from N400 effect.

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    Wang, Hongyan; Zhang, Gaoyan; Liu, Baolin

    2017-01-01

    Semantic priming is an important research topic in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Previous studies have shown that the uni-modal semantic priming effect can be modulated by attention. However, the influence of attention on cross-modal semantic priming is unclear. To investigate this issue, the present study combined a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm with an auditory spatial attention paradigm, presenting the visual pictures as the prime stimuli and the semantically related or unrelated sounds as the target stimuli. Event-related potentials results showed that when the target sound was attended to, the N400 effect was evoked. The N400 effect was also observed when the target sound was not attended to, demonstrating that the cross-modal semantic priming effect persists even though the target stimulus is not focused on. Further analyses revealed that the N400 effect evoked by the unattended sound was significantly lower than the effect evoked by the attended sound. This contrast provides new evidence that the cross-modal semantic priming effect can be modulated by attention.

  12. The role of semantic and phonological factors in word recognition: an ERP cross-modal priming study of derivational morphology.

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    Kielar, Aneta; Joanisse, Marc F

    2011-01-01

    Theories of morphological processing differ on the issue of how lexical and grammatical information are stored and accessed. A key point of contention is whether complex forms are decomposed during recognition (e.g., establish+ment), compared to forms that cannot be analyzed into constituent morphemes (e.g., apartment). In the present study, we examined these issues with respect to English derivational morphology by measuring ERP responses during a cross-modal priming lexical decision task. ERP priming effects for semantically and phonologically transparent derived words (government-govern) were compared to those of semantically opaque derived words (apartment-apart) as well as "quasi-regular" items that represent intermediate cases of morphological transparency (dresser-dress). Additional conditions independently manipulated semantic and phonological relatedness in non-derived words (semantics: couch-sofa; phonology: panel-pan). The degree of N400 ERP priming to morphological forms varied depending on the amount of semantic and phonological overlap between word types, rather than respecting a bivariate distinction between derived and opaque forms. Moreover, these effects could not be accounted for by semantic or phonological relatedness alone. The findings support the theory that morphological relatedness is graded rather than absolute, and depend on the joint contribution of form and meaning overlap. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  13. Attentional Sensitization of Unconscious Cognition: Task Sets Modulate Subsequent Masked Semantic Priming

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    Kiefer, Markus; Martens, Ulla

    2010-01-01

    According to classical theories, automatic processes are autonomous and independent of higher level cognitive influence. In contrast, the authors propose that automatic processing depends on attentional sensitization of task-congruent processing pathways. In 3 experiments, the authors tested this hypothesis with a modified masked semantic priming…

  14. Impacts of religious semantic priming on an intertemporal discounting task: Response time effects and neural correlates.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Morgan, Jonathan; Clark, Dustin; Tripodis, Yorghos; Halloran, Christopher S; Minsky, April; Wildman, Wesley J; Durso, Raymon; McNamara, Patrick

    2016-08-01

    The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that religious primes would influence intertemporal discounting behaviors in neurotypical older adults, but not in participants with Parkinson's disease (PD). Furthermore, we predicted that this priming effect would be related to functional connectivity within neural networks mediating religious cognition, decision-making, reward valuing, and prospection processes. Contrary to past research with young adults, we found a significant positive relationship between religiosity and discounting rates. Religious semantic primes did not reliably shift individual discounting rates. But religious controls did respond more quickly to intertemporal decisions under the religious priming condition than the neutral condition, compared to response time differences among the participants with PD. Differences in response time were significantly associated with functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens and various regions, including the left anterior cingulate cortex and Brodmann areas 10 and 46 in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that religious primes influence discounting behavior via dopaminergic meso-limbic and right dorsolateral prefrontal supporting cognitive valuation and prospection processes. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  15. The Influence of Working Memory Load on Semantic Priming

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    Heyman, Tom; Van Rensbergen, Bram; Storms, Gert; Hutchison, Keith A.; De Deyne, Simon

    2015-01-01

    The present research examines the nature of the different processes that have been proposed to underlie semantic priming. Specifically, it has been argued that priming arises as a result of "automatic target activation" and/or the use of strategies like prospective "expectancy generation" and "retrospective semantic…

  16. Mechanisms of masked evaluative priming: task sets modulate behavioral and electrophysiological priming for picture and words differentially

    OpenAIRE

    Kiefer, Markus; Liegel, Nathalie; Zovko, Monika; Wentura, Dirk

    2016-01-01

    Research with the evaluative priming paradigm has shown that affective evaluation processes reliably influence cognition and behavior, even when triggered outside awareness. However, the precise mechanisms underlying such subliminal evaluative priming effects, response activation vs semantic processing, are matter of a debate. In this study, we determined the relative contribution of semantic processing and response activation to masked evaluative priming with pictures and words. To this end,...

  17. A novel co-occurrence-based approach to predict pure associative and semantic priming.

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    Roelke, Andre; Franke, Nicole; Biemann, Chris; Radach, Ralph; Jacobs, Arthur M; Hofmann, Markus J

    2018-03-15

    The theoretical "difficulty in separating association strength from [semantic] feature overlap" has resulted in inconsistent findings of either the presence or absence of "pure" associative priming in recent literature (Hutchison, 2003, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10(4), p. 787). The present study used co-occurrence statistics of words in sentences to provide a full factorial manipulation of direct association (strong/no) and the number of common associates (many/no) of the prime and target words. These common associates were proposed to serve as semantic features for a recent interactive activation model of semantic processing (i.e., the associative read-out model; Hofmann & Jacobs, 2014). With stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) as an additional factor, our findings indicate that associative and semantic priming are indeed dissociable. Moreover, the effect of direct association was strongest at a long SOA (1,000 ms), while many common associates facilitated lexical decisions primarily at a short SOA (200 ms). This response pattern is consistent with previous performance-based accounts and suggests that associative and semantic priming can be evoked by computationally determined direct and common associations.

  18. Semantic encoding and retrieval in the left inferior prefrontal cortex: a functional MRI study of task difficulty and process specificity.

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    Demb, J B; Desmond, J E; Wagner, A D; Vaidya, C J; Glover, G H; Gabrieli, J D

    1995-09-01

    Prefrontal cortical function was examined during semantic encoding and repetition priming using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a noninvasive technique for localizing regional changes in blood oxygenation, a correlate of neural activity. Words studied in a semantic (deep) encoding condition were better remembered than words studied in both easier and more difficult nonsemantic (shallow) encoding conditions, with difficulty indexed by response time. The left inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPC) (Brodmann's areas 45, 46, 47) showed increased activation during semantic encoding relative to nonsemantic encoding regardless of the relative difficulty of the nonsemantic encoding task. Therefore, LIPC activation appears to be related to semantic encoding and not task difficulty. Semantic encoding decisions are performed faster the second time words are presented. This represents semantic repetition priming, a facilitation in semantic processing for previously encoded words that is not dependent on intentional recollection. The same LIPC area activated during semantic encoding showed decreased activation during repeated semantic encoding relative to initial semantic encoding of the same words. This decrease in activation during repeated encoding was process specific; it occurred when words were semantically reprocessed but not when words were nonsemantically reprocessed. The results were apparent in both individual and averaged functional maps. These findings suggest that the LIPC is part of a semantic executive system that contributes to the on-line retrieval of semantic information.

  19. Phonologically-Based Priming in the Same-Different Task With L1 Readers.

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    Lupker, Stephen J; Nakayama, Mariko; Yoshihara, Masahiro

    2018-02-01

    The present experiment provides an investigation of a promising new tool, the masked priming same-different task, for investigating the orthographic coding process. Orthographic coding is the process of establishing a mental representation of the letters and letter order in the word being read which is then used by readers to access higher-level (e.g., semantic) information about that word. Prior research (e.g., Norris & Kinoshita, 2008) had suggested that performance in this task may be based entirely on orthographic codes. As reported by Lupker, Nakayama, and Perea (2015a), however, in at least some circumstances, phonological codes also play a role. Specifically, even though their 2 languages are completely different orthographically, Lupker et al.'s Japanese-English bilinguals showed priming in this task when masked L1 primes were phonologically similar to L2 targets. An obvious follow-up question is whether Lupker et al.'s effect might have resulted from a strategy that was adopted by their bilinguals to aid in processing of, and memory for, the somewhat unfamiliar L2 targets. In the present experiment, Japanese readers responded to (Japanese) Kanji targets with phonologically identical primes (on "related" trials) being presented in a completely different but highly familiar Japanese script, Hiragana. Once again, significant priming effects were observed, indicating that, although performance in the masked priming same-different task may be mainly based on orthographic codes, phonological codes can play a role even when the stimuli being matched are familiar words from a reader's L1. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

  20. Priming the semantic neighbourhood during the attentional blink.

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    Irina M Harris

    2010-09-01

    Full Text Available When two targets are presented in close temporal proximity amongst a rapid serial visual stream of distractors, a period of disrupted attention and attenuated awareness lasting 200-500 ms follows identification of the first target (T1. This phenomenon is known as the "attentional blink" (AB and is generally attributed to a failure to consolidate information in visual short-term memory due to depleted or disrupted attentional resources. Previous research has shown that items presented during the AB that fail to reach conscious awareness are still processed to relatively high levels, including the level of meaning. For example, missed word stimuli have been shown to prime later targets that are closely associated words. Although these findings have been interpreted as evidence for semantic processing during the AB, closely associated words (e.g., day-night may also rely on specific, well-worn, lexical associative links which enhance attention to the relevant target.We used a measure of semantic distance to create prime-target pairs that are conceptually close, but have low word associations (e.g., wagon and van and investigated priming from a distractor stimulus presented during the AB to a subsequent target (T2. The stimuli were words (concrete nouns in Experiment 1 and the corresponding pictures of objects in Experiment 2. In both experiments, report of T2 was facilitated when this item was preceded by a semantically-related distractor.This study is the first to show conclusively that conceptual information is extracted from distractor stimuli presented during a period of attenuated awareness and that this information spreads to neighbouring concepts within a semantic network.

  1. Repetition priming of face recognition in a serial choice reaction-time task.

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    Roberts, T; Bruce, V

    1989-05-01

    Marshall & Walker (1987) found that pictorial stimuli yield visual priming that is disrupted by an unpredictable visual event in the response-stimulus interval. They argue that visual stimuli are represented in memory in the form of distinct visual and object codes. Bruce & Young (1986) propose similar pictorial, structural and semantic codes which mediate the recognition of faces, yet repetition priming results obtained with faces as stimuli (Bruce & Valentine, 1985), and with objects (Warren & Morton, 1982) are quite different from those of Marshall & Walker (1987), in the sense that recognition is facilitated by pictures presented 20 minutes earlier. The experiment reported here used different views of familiar and unfamiliar faces as stimuli in a serial choice reaction-time task and found that, with identical pictures, repetition priming survives and intervening item requiring a response, with both familiar and unfamiliar faces. Furthermore, with familiar faces such priming was present even when the view of the prime was different from the target. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

  2. Automatic processing of semantic relations in fMRI: neural activation during semantic priming of taxonomic and thematic categories.

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    Sachs, Olga; Weis, Susanne; Zellagui, Nadia; Huber, Walter; Zvyagintsev, Mikhail; Mathiak, Klaus; Kircher, Tilo

    2008-07-07

    Most current models of knowledge organization are based on hierarchical or taxonomic categories (animals, tools). Another important organizational pattern is thematic categorization, i.e. categories held together by external relations, a unifying scene or event (car and garage). The goal of this study was to compare the neural correlates of these categories under automatic processing conditions that minimize strategic influences. We used fMRI to examine neural correlates of semantic priming for category members with a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 200 ms as subjects performed a lexical decision task. Four experimental conditions were compared: thematically related words (car-garage); taxonomically related (car-bus); unrelated (car-spoon); non-word trials (car-derf). We found faster reaction times for related than for unrelated prime-target pairs for both thematic and taxonomic categories. However, the size of the thematic priming effect was greater than that of the taxonomic. The imaging data showed signal changes for the taxonomic priming effects in the right precuneus, postcentral gyrus, middle frontal and superior frontal gyri and thematic priming effects in the right middle frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate. The contrast of neural priming effects showed larger signal changes in the right precuneus associated with the taxonomic but not with thematic priming response. We suggest that the greater involvement of precuneus in the processing of taxonomic relations indicates their reduced salience in the knowledge structure compared to more prominent thematic relations.

  3. Test-retest reliability and stability of N400 effects in a word-pair semantic priming paradigm.

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    Kiang, Michael; Patriciu, Iulia; Roy, Carolyn; Christensen, Bruce K; Zipursky, Robert B

    2013-04-01

    Elicited by any meaningful stimulus, the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component is reduced when the stimulus is related to a preceding one. This N400 semantic priming effect has been used to probe abnormal semantic relationship processing in clinical disorders, and suggested as a possible biomarker for treatment studies. Validating N400 semantic priming effects as a clinical biomarker requires characterizing their test-retest reliability. We assessed test-retest reliability of N400 semantic priming in 16 healthy adults who viewed the same related and unrelated prime-target word pairs in two sessions one week apart. As expected, N400 amplitudes were smaller for related versus unrelated targets across sessions. N400 priming effects (amplitude differences between unrelated and related targets) were highly correlated across sessions (r=0.85, Pmotivational changes. Use of N400 priming effects in treatment studies should account for possible magnitude decreases with repeat testing. Further research is needed to delineate N400 priming effects' test-retest reliability and stability in different age and clinical groups, and with different stimulus types. Copyright © 2012 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  4. Social priming increases nonverbal expressive behaviors in schizophrenia.

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    Jonathan Del-Monte

    Full Text Available Semantic priming tasks are classically used to influence and implicitly promote target behaviors. Recently, several studies have demonstrated that prosocial semantic priming modulated feelings of social affiliation. The main aim of this study was to determine whether inducing feelings of social affiliation using priming tasks could modulate nonverbal social behaviors in schizophrenia. We used the Scrambled Sentence Task to prime schizophrenia patients according to three priming group conditions: pro-social, non-social or anti-social. Forty-five schizophrenia patients, diagnosed according to DSM-IV-TR, were randomly assigned to one of the three priming groups of 15 participants. We evaluated nonverbal social behaviors using the Motor-Affective subscale of the Motor-Affective-Social-Scale. Results showed that schizophrenia patients with pro-social priming had significantly more nonverbal behaviors than schizophrenia patients with anti-social and non-social priming conditions. Schizophrenia patient behaviors are affected by social priming. Our results have several clinical implications for the rehabilitation of social skills impairments frequently encountered among individuals with schizophrenia.

  5. Priming analogical reasoning with false memories.

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    Howe, Mark L; Garner, Sarah R; Threadgold, Emma; Ball, Linden J

    2015-08-01

    Like true memories, false memories are capable of priming answers to insight-based problems. Recent research has attempted to extend this paradigm to more advanced problem-solving tasks, including those involving verbal analogical reasoning. However, these experiments are constrained inasmuch as problem solutions could be generated via spreading activation mechanisms (much like false memories themselves) rather than using complex reasoning processes. In three experiments we examined false memory priming of complex analogical reasoning tasks in the absence of simple semantic associations. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated the robustness of false memory priming in analogical reasoning when backward associative strength among the problem terms was eliminated. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we extended these findings by demonstrating priming on newly created homonym analogies that can only be solved by inhibiting semantic associations within the analogy. Overall, the findings of the present experiments provide evidence that the efficacy of false memory priming extends to complex analogical reasoning problems.

  6. Unconscious Congruency Priming from Unpracticed Words Is Modulated by Prime-Target Semantic Relatedness

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ortells, Juan J.; Mari-Beffa, Paloma; Plaza-Ayllon, Vanesa

    2013-01-01

    Participants performed a 2-choice categorization task on visible word targets that were preceded by novel (unpracticed) prime words. The prime words were presented for 33 ms and followed either immediately (Experiments 1-3) or after a variable delay (Experiments 1 and 4) by a pattern mask. Both subjective and objective measures of prime visibility…

  7. Spreading Activation in an Attractor Network with Latching Dynamics: Automatic Semantic Priming Revisited

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    Lerner, Itamar; Bentin, Shlomo; Shriki, Oren

    2012-01-01

    Localist models of spreading activation (SA) and models assuming distributed representations offer very different takes on semantic priming, a widely investigated paradigm in word recognition and semantic memory research. In this study, we implemented SA in an attractor neural network model with distributed representations and created a unified…

  8. Congruence Effect in Semantic Categorization with Masked Primes with Narrow and Broad Categories

    Science.gov (United States)

    Quinn, Wendy Maree; Kinoshita, Sachiko

    2008-01-01

    In semantic categorization, masked primes that are category-congruent with the target (e.g., "Planets: mars-VENUS") facilitate responses relative to category-incongruent primes (e.g., "tree-VENUS"). The present study investigated why this category congruence effect is more consistently found with narrow categories (e.g., "Numbers larger/smaller…

  9. Further evidence that similar principles govern recall from episodic and semantic memory: the Canadian prime ministerial serial position function.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Neath, Ian; Saint-Aubin, Jean

    2011-06-01

    The serial position function, with its characteristic primacy and recency effects, is one of the most ubiquitous findings in episodic memory tasks. In contrast, there are only two demonstrations of such functions in tasks thought to tap semantic memory. Here, we provide a third demonstration, showing that free recall of the prime ministers of Canada also results in a serial position function. Scale Independent Memory, Perception, and Learning (SIMPLE), a local distinctiveness model of memory that was designed to account for serial position effects in episodic memory, fit the data. According to SIMPLE, serial position functions observed in episodic and semantic memory all reflect the relative distinctiveness principle: items will be well remembered to the extent that they are more distinct than competing items at the time of retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).

  10. The development of object function and manipulation knowledge: evidence from a semantic priming study

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    Cynthia Collette

    2016-08-01

    Full Text Available Object semantics include object function and manipulation knowledge. Function knowledge refers to the goal attainable by using an object (e.g. the function of a key is to open or close a door while manipulation knowledge refers to gestures one has to execute to use an object appropriately (e.g. a key is held between the thumb and the index, inserted into the door lock and then turned.To date, several studies have assessed function and manipulation knowledge in brain lesion patients as well as in healthy adult populations. In patients with left brain damage, a double dissociation between these two types of knowledge has been reported; on the other hand, behavioral studies in healthy adults show that function knowledge is processed faster than manipulation knowledge. Empirical evidence has shown that object interaction in children differs from that in adults, suggesting that the access to function and manipulation knowledge in children might also differ.To investigate the development of object function and manipulation knowledge, 51 typically developing 8-9-10 year-old children and 17 healthy young adults were tested on a naming task associated with a semantic priming paradigm (190-ms SOA; prime duration: 90 ms in which a series of line drawings of manipulable objects were used. Target objects could be preceded by three priming contexts: related (e.g. knife-scissors for function; key-screwdriver for manipulation, unrelated but visually similar (e.g. glasses-scissors; baseball bat-screwdriver, and purely unrelated (e.g. die-scissors; tissue-screwdriver.Results showed a different developmental pattern of function and manipulation priming effects. Function priming effects were not present in children and emerged only in adults, with faster naming responses for targets preceded by objects sharing the same function. In contrast, manipulation priming effects were already present in 8-year-olds with faster naming responses for targets preceded by objects

  11. Repetition-priming effect: a cognitive task for the definition of a clinical assessment

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    Silvia Pagani

    2014-04-01

    Full Text Available This research aims to study how semantic priming words can influence behavioral measures (RTs, accuracy, to develop an experimental paradigm to differentiate visual neglect and hemianopia. 69 experimental subjects were involved in four experiments. In each experiment target words were preceded by word primes semantically related, neutral or unrelated to the target. The four experiments differed in terms of: number of prime, prime duration and distance between PC monitor and subject. In general, related primes should improve facilitatory effect in target recognition more than unrelated primes, reducing RTs and increasing response accuracy. After repeated ANOVA analysis applied to each experiment and paired comparisons, it is possible to point out that single related primes, shown for 150 ms, greatly improve response behavior in terms of RTs reduction. For future applications to the clinical field, we assume that neglect patients should be facilitated in these specific experimental conditions, due to implicit contralesional prime processing. On the contrary, hemianopics should nowise be facilitated, due to visual field deficit.

  12. The impact of semantic impairment on word stem completion in Alzheimer's disease.

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    Beauregard, M; Chertkow, H; Gold, D; Bergman, S

    2001-01-01

    Both the extent of semantic memory impairment and the level of processing attained during encoding might constitute critical factors in determining the amount of word-stem completion (WSC) priming encountered in Alzheimer's disease (AD) subjects. We investigated the impact of varying encoding level in AD and elderly normal subjects, using a set of stimuli ranked as "intact" or "degraded" in terms of each subject's semantic knowledge on probe questions. For both shallow and deep encoding conditions, overall priming in the two subject groups was equivalent. However, for the deep encoding condition, consisting of a semantic judgment task performed on each target word, the priming effect noted in AD subjects was significantly smaller for semantically degraded items than for semantically intact items. Results indicate that the degree of semantic impairment represents one important variable affecting the amount of WSC priming which results when deep encoding procedures are used at study.

  13. Priming performance-related concerns induces task-related mind-wandering.

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    Jordano, Megan L; Touron, Dayna R

    2017-10-01

    Two experiments tested the hypothesis that priming of performance-related concerns would (1) increase the frequency of task-related mind-wandering (i.e., task-related interference; TRI) and (2) decrease task performance. In each experiment, sixty female participants completed an operation span task (OSPAN) containing thought content probes. The task was framed as a math task for those in a condition primed for math-related stereotype threat and as a memory task for those in a control condition. In both studies, women whose performance-related concerns were primed via stereotype threat reported more TRI than women in the control. The second experiment used a more challenging OSPAN task and stereotype primed women also had lower math accuracy than controls. These results support the "control failures×current concerns" framework of mind-wandering, which posits that the degree to which the environmental context triggers personal concerns influences both mind-wandering frequency and content. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  14. Response-Retrieval in Identity Negative Priming is Modulated by Temporal Discriminability

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    Matthias eMittner

    2014-06-01

    Full Text Available Reaction times to previously ignored information are often delayed, a phenomenon referred to as negative priming (NP. Rothermund, Wentura & De Houwer (2005 proposed that negative priming is caused by the retrieval of incidental stimulus-response associations when consecutive displays share visual features but require different responses. In two experiments we examined whether the features (color, shape that reappear in consecutive displays, or their level of processing (early-perceptual, late-semantic moderate the likelihood that stimulus-response associations are retrieved. Using a perceptual matching task (experiment 1, negative priming occurred independently of whether responses were repeated or switched. Only when implementing a semantic-matching task (experiment 2, negative priming was determined by response-repetition as predicted by response-retrieval theory. The results can be explained in terms of a task-dependent temporal discrimination process (Milliken et al., 1998: Response-relevant features are encoded more strongly and/or are more likely to be retrieved than irrelevant features.

  15. A new semantic vigilance task: vigilance decrement, workload, and sensitivity to dual-task costs.

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    Epling, Samantha L; Russell, Paul N; Helton, William S

    2016-01-01

    Cognitive resource theory is a common explanation for both the performance decline in vigilance tasks, known as the vigilance decrement, and the limited ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. The limited supply of cognitive resources may be utilized faster than they are replenished resulting in a performance decrement, or may need to be allocated among multiple tasks with some performance cost. Researchers have proposed both domain-specific, for example spatial versus verbal processing resources, and domain general cognitive resources. One challenge in testing the domain specificity of cognitive resources in vigilance is the current lack of difficult semantic vigilance tasks which reliably produce a decrement. In the present research, we investigated whether the vigilance decrement was found in a new abbreviated semantic discrimination vigilance task, and whether there was a performance decrement in said vigilance task when paired with a word recall task, as opposed to performed individually. As hypothesized, a vigilance decrement in the semantic vigilance task was found in both the single-task and dual-task conditions, along with reduced vigilance performance in the dual-task condition and reduced word recall in the dual-task condition. This is consistent with cognitive resource theory. The abbreviated semantic vigilance task will be a useful tool for researchers interested in determining the specificity of cognitive resources utilized in vigilance tasks.

  16. Accessing world knowledge: evidence from N400 and reaction time priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chwilla, Dorothee J; Kolk, Herman H J

    2005-12-01

    How fast are we in accessing world knowledge? In two experiments, we tested for priming for word triplets that described a conceptual script (e.g., DIRECTOR-BRIBE-DISMISSAL) but were not associatively related and did not share a category relationship. Event-related brain potentials were used to track the time course at which script information becomes available. In Experiment 1, in which participants made lexical decisions, we found a facilitation for script-related relative to unrelated triplets, as indicated by (i) a decrease in both reaction time and errors, and (ii) an N400-like priming effect. In Experiment 2, we further explored the locus of script priming by increasing the contribution of meaning integration processes. The participants' task was to indicate whether the three words presented a plausible scenario. Again, an N400 script priming effect was obtained. Directing attention to script relations was effective in enhancing the N400 effect. The time course of the N400 effect was similar to that of the standard N400 effect to semantic relations. The present results show that script priming can be obtained in the visual modality, and that script information is immediately accessed and integrated with context. This supports the view that script information forms a central aspect of word meaning. The RT and N400 script priming effects reported in this article are problematic for most current semantic priming models, like spreading activation models, expectancy models, and task-specific semantic matching/integration models. They support a view in which there is no clear cutoff point between semantic knowledge and world knowledge.

  17. Word encoding during sleep is suggested by correlations between word-evoked up-states and post-sleep semantic priming

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    Simon eRuch

    2014-11-01

    Full Text Available To test whether humans can encode words during sleep we played everyday words to men while they were napping and assessed priming from sleep-played words following waking. Words were presented during non-rapid eye movement (NREM sleep. Priming was assessed using a semantic and a perceptual priming test. These tests measured differences in the processing of words that had been or had not been played during sleep. Synonyms to sleep-played words were the targets in the semantic priming test that tapped the meaning of sleep-played words. All men responded to sleep-played words by producing up-states in their electroencephalogram. Up-states are NREM sleep-specific phases of briefly increased neuronal excitability. The word-evoked up-states might have promoted word processing during sleep. Yet, the mean performance in the priming tests administered following sleep was at chance level, which suggests that participants as a group failed to show priming following sleep. However, performance in the two priming tests was positively correlated to each other and to the magnitude of the word-evoked up-states. Hence, the larger a participant’s word-evoked up-states, the larger his perceptual and semantic priming. Those participants who scored high on all variables must have encoded words during sleep. We conclude that some humans are able to encode words during sleep, but more research is needed to pin down the factors that modulate this ability.

  18. Semantic processing in deaf and hard-of-hearing children: Large N400 mismatch effects in brain responses, despite poor semantic ability

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    Petter Kallioinen

    2016-08-01

    Full Text Available Difficulties in auditory and phonological processing affect semantic processing in speech comprehension of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH children. However, little is known about brain responses of semantic processing in this group. We investigated event-related potentials (ERPs in DHH children with cochlear implants (CI and/or hearing aids (HA, and in normally hearing controls (NH. We used a semantic priming task with spoken word primes followed by picture targets. In both DHH children and controls, response differences between matching and mismatching targets revealed a typical N400-effect associated with semantic processing. Children with CI had the largest mismatch response despite poor semantic abilities overall, children with CI also had the largest ERP differentiation between mismatch types, with small effects of within-category mismatches (target from same category as prime and large effects between-category mismatches (were target is from a different category than prime. NH and HA children had similar responses to both mismatch types. While the large and differentiated ERP responses in the CI group were unexpected and should be interpreted with caution, the results could reflect less precision in semantic processing among children with CI, or a stronger reliance on predictive processing.

  19. Comparing implicit and explicit semantic access of direct and indirect word pairs in schizophrenia to evaluate models of semantic memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Neill, Erica; Rossell, Susan Lee

    2013-02-28

    Semantic memory deficits in schizophrenia (SZ) are profound, yet there is no research comparing implicit and explicit semantic processing in the same participant sample. In the current study, both implicit and explicit priming are investigated using direct (LION-TIGER) and indirect (LION-STRIPES; where tiger is not displayed) stimuli comparing SZ to healthy controls. Based on a substantive review (Rossell and Stefanovic, 2007) and meta-analysis (Pomarol-Clotet et al., 2008), it was predicted that SZ would be associated with increased indirect priming implicitly. Further, it was predicted that SZ would be associated with abnormal indirect priming explicitly, replicating earlier work (Assaf et al., 2006). No specific hypotheses were made for implicit direct priming due to the heterogeneity of the literature. It was hypothesised that explicit direct priming would be intact based on the structured nature of this task. The pattern of results suggests (1) intact reaction time (RT) and error performance implicitly in the face of abnormal direct priming and (2) impaired RT and error performance explicitly. This pattern confirms general findings regarding implicit/explicit memory impairments in SZ whilst highlighting the unique pattern of performance specific to semantic priming. Finally, priming performance is discussed in relation to thought disorder and length of illness. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  20. Semantic processing of unattended parafoveal words.

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    Di Pace, E; Longoni, A M; Zoccolotti, P

    1991-08-01

    The influence that a context word presented either foveally or parafoveally, may exert on the processing of a subsequent target word was studied in a semantic decision task. Fourteen subjects participated in the experiment. They were presented with word-nonword pairs (prime). One member of the pair (which the subjects had to attend to) appeared centrally, the other parafoveally. The prime was followed by a target at two inter-stimulus intervals (ISI; 200 and 2000 msec). The word stimulus of the pair could be semantically related or unrelated to the target. The subjects' task was to classify the target as animal or not animal by pressing one of two buttons as quickly as possible. When the target word was semantically associated with the foveal (attended) word the reaction times were faster for both ISIs; when it was associated with the parafoveal (unattended) word in the prime pair, there were facilitatory effects only in the short ISI condition. A second experiment was run in order to evaluate the possibility that the obtained results were due to identification of the parafoveal stimulus. The same prime-target pairs of experiment 1 (without the target stimuli) were used. The prime-target pairs were presented to fourteen subjects who were requested to name the foveal (attended) stimulus and subsequently, if possible, the parafoveal (unattended) one. Even in this condition, percentage of identification of the unattended word was only 15%, suggesting that previous findings were not due to identification of unattended stimuli. Results are discussed in relation to Posner and Snyder's (1975) dual coding theory.

  1. Intelligence related upper alpha desynchronization in a semantic memory task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Doppelmayr, M; Klimesch, W; Hödlmoser, K; Sauseng, P; Gruber, W

    2005-07-30

    Recent evidence shows that event-related (upper) alpha desynchronization (ERD) is related to cognitive performance. Several studies observed a positive, some a negative relationship. The latter finding, interpreted in terms of the neural efficiency hypothesis, suggests that good performance is associated with a more 'efficient', smaller extent of cortical activation. Other studies found that ERD increases with semantic processing demands and that this increase is larger for good performers. Studies supporting the neural efficiency hypothesis used tasks that do not specifically require semantic processing. Thus, we assume that the lack of semantic processing demands may at least in part be responsible for the reduced ERD. In the present study we measured ERD during a difficult verbal-semantic task. The findings demonstrate that during semantic processing, more intelligent (as compared to less intelligent) subjects exhibited a significantly larger upper alpha ERD over the left hemisphere. We conclude that more intelligent subjects exhibit a more extensive activation in a semantic processing system and suggest that divergent findings regarding the neural efficiency hypotheses are due to task specific differences in semantic processing demands.

  2. Task choice and semantic interference in picture naming

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    Piai, V.; Roelofs, A.P.A.; Schriefers, H.J.

    2015-01-01

    Evidence from dual-task performance indicates that speakers prefer not to select simultaneous responses in picture naming and another unrelated task, suggesting a response selection bottleneck in naming. In particular, when participants respond to tones with a manual response and name pictures with superimposed semantically related or unrelated distractor words, semantic interference in naming tends to be constant across stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between the tone stimulus and the pic...

  3. Semantic priming increases word frequency judgments: Evidence for the role of memory strength in frequency estimation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Woltz, Dan J; Gardner, Michael K

    2015-09-01

    Previous research has demonstrated a systematic, nonlinear relationship between word frequency judgments and values from word frequency norms. This relationship could reflect a perceptual process similar to that found in the psychophysics literature for a variety of sensory phenomena. Alternatively, it could reflect memory strength differences that are expected for words of varying levels of prior exposure. Two experiments tested the memory strength explanation by semantically priming words prior to frequency judgments. Exposure to related word meanings produced a small but measurable increase in target word frequency ratings. Repetition but not semantic priming had a greater impact on low compared to high frequency words. These findings are consistent with a memory strength view of frequency judgments that assumes a distributed network with lexical and semantic levels of representation. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  4. Electrocortical N400 Effects of Semantic Satiation

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    Kim Ströberg

    2017-12-01

    Full Text Available Semantic satiation is characterised by the subjective and temporary loss of meaning after high repetition of a prime word. To study the nature of this effect, previous electroencephalography (EEG research recorded the N400, an ERP component that is sensitive to violations of semantic context. The N400 is characterised by a relative negativity to words that are unrelated vs. related to the semantic context. The semantic satiation hypothesis predicts that the N400 should decrease with high repetition. However, previous findings have been inconsistent. Because of these inconsistent findings and the shortcomings of previous research, we used a modified design that minimises confounding effects from non-semantic processes. We recorded 64-channel EEG and analysed the N400 in a semantic priming task in which the primes were repeated 3 or 30 times. Critically, we separated low and high repetition trials and excluded response trials. Further, we varied the physical features (letter case and format of consecutive primes to minimise confounding effects from perceptual habituation. For centrofrontal electrodes, the N400 was reduced after 30 repetitions (vs. 3 repetitions. Explorative source reconstructions suggested that activity decreased after 30 repetitions in bilateral inferior temporal gyrus, the right posterior section of the superior and middle temporal gyrus, right supramarginal gyrus, bilateral lateral occipital cortex, and bilateral lateral orbitofrontal cortex. These areas overlap broadly with those typically involved in the N400, namely middle temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus. The results support the semantic rather than the perceptual nature of the satiation effect.

  5. Task modulation of disyllabic spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese: a unimodal ERP study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Huang, Xianjun; Yang, Jin-Chen; Chang, Ruohan; Guo, Chunyan

    2016-05-16

    Using unimodal auditory tasks of word-matching and meaning-matching, this study investigated how the phonological and semantic processes in Chinese disyllabic spoken word recognition are modulated by top-down mechanism induced by experimental tasks. Both semantic similarity and word-initial phonological similarity between the primes and targets were manipulated. Results showed that at early stage of recognition (~150-250 ms), an enhanced P2 was elicited by the word-initial phonological mismatch in both tasks. In ~300-500 ms, a fronto-central negative component was elicited by word-initial phonological similarities in the word-matching task, while a parietal negativity was elicited by semantically unrelated primes in the meaning-matching task, indicating that both the semantic and phonological processes can be involved in this time window, depending on the task requirements. In the late stage (~500-700 ms), a centro-parietal Late N400 was elicited in both tasks, but with a larger effect in the meaning-matching task than in the word-matching task. This finding suggests that the semantic representation of the spoken words can be activated automatically in the late stage of recognition, even when semantic processing is not required. However, the magnitude of the semantic activation is modulated by task requirements.

  6. An RT distribution analysis of relatedness proportion effects in lexical decision and semantic categorization reveals different mechanisms.

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    de Wit, Bianca; Kinoshita, Sachiko

    2015-01-01

    The magnitude of the semantic priming effect is known to increase as the proportion of related prime-target pairs in an experiment increases. This relatedness proportion (RP) effect was studied in a lexical decision task at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (240 ms), which is widely assumed to preclude strategic prospective usage of the prime. The analysis of the reaction time (RT) distribution suggested that the observed RP effect reflected a modulation of a retrospective semantic matching process. The pattern of the RP effect on the RT distribution found here is contrasted to that reported in De Wit and Kinoshita's (2014) semantic categorization study, and it is concluded that the RP effect is driven by different underlying mechanisms in lexical decision and semantic categorization.

  7. Task choice and semantic interference in picture naming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Piai, Vitória; Roelofs, Ardi; Schriefers, Herbert

    2015-05-01

    Evidence from dual-task performance indicates that speakers prefer not to select simultaneous responses in picture naming and another unrelated task, suggesting a response selection bottleneck in naming. In particular, when participants respond to tones with a manual response and name pictures with superimposed semantically related or unrelated distractor words, semantic interference in naming tends to be constant across stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between the tone stimulus and the picture-word stimulus. In the present study, we examine whether semantic interference in picture naming depends on SOA in case of a task choice (naming the picture vs reading the word of a picture-word stimulus) based on tones. This situation requires concurrent processing of the tone stimulus and the picture-word stimulus, but not a manual response to the tones. On each trial, participants either named a picture or read aloud a word depending on the pitch of a tone, which was presented simultaneously with picture-word onset or 350 ms or 1000 ms before picture-word onset. Semantic interference was present with tone pre-exposure, but absent when tone and picture-word stimulus were presented simultaneously. Against the background of the available studies, these results support an account according to which speakers tend to avoid concurrent response selection, but can engage in other types of concurrent processing, such as task choices. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  8. Preserved cumulative semantic interference despite amnesia

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    Gary Michael Oppenheim

    2015-05-01

    As predicted by Oppenheim et al’s (2010 implicit incremental learning account, WRP’s BCN RTs demonstrated strong (and significant repetition priming and semantic blocking effects (Figure 1. Similar to typical results from neurally intact undergraduates, WRP took longer to name pictures presented in semantically homogeneous blocks than in heterogeneous blocks, an effect that increased with each cycle. This result challenges accounts that ascribe cumulative semantic interference in this task to explicit memory mechanisms, instead suggesting that the effect has the sort of implicit learning bases that are typically spared in hippocampal amnesia.

  9. Different Loci of Semantic Interference in Picture Naming vs. Word-Picture Matching Tasks.

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    Harvey, Denise Y; Schnur, Tatiana T

    2016-01-01

    Naming pictures and matching words to pictures belonging to the same semantic category impairs performance relative to when stimuli come from different semantic categories (i.e., semantic interference). Despite similar semantic interference phenomena in both picture naming and word-picture matching tasks, the locus of interference has been attributed to different levels of the language system - lexical in naming and semantic in word-picture matching. Although both tasks involve access to shared semantic representations, the extent to which interference originates and/or has its locus at a shared level remains unclear, as these effects are often investigated in isolation. We manipulated semantic context in cyclical picture naming and word-picture matching tasks, and tested whether factors tapping semantic-level (generalization of interference to novel category items) and lexical-level processes (interactions with lexical frequency) affected the magnitude of interference, while also assessing whether interference occurs at a shared processing level(s) (transfer of interference across tasks). We found that semantic interference in naming was sensitive to both semantic- and lexical-level processes (i.e., larger interference for novel vs. old and low- vs. high-frequency stimuli), consistent with a semantically mediated lexical locus. Interference in word-picture matching exhibited stable interference for old and novel stimuli and did not interact with lexical frequency. Further, interference transferred from word-picture matching to naming. Together, these experiments provide evidence to suggest that semantic interference in both tasks originates at a shared processing stage (presumably at the semantic level), but that it exerts its effect at different loci when naming pictures vs. matching words to pictures.

  10. Associative priming in a masked perceptual identification task: evidence for automatic processes.

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    Pecher, Diane; Zeelenberg, René; Raaijmakers, Jeroen G W

    2002-10-01

    Two experiments investigated the influence of automatic and strategic processes on associative priming effects in a perceptual identification task in which prime-target pairs are briefly presented and masked. In this paradigm, priming is defined as a higher percentage of correctly identified targets for related pairs than for unrelated pairs. In Experiment 1, priming was obtained for mediated word pairs. This mediated priming effect was affected neither by the presence of direct associations nor by the presentation time of the primes, indicating that automatic priming effects play a role in perceptual identification. Experiment 2 showed that the priming effect was not affected by the proportion (.90 vs. .10) of related pairs if primes were presented briefly to prevent their identification. However, a large proportion effect was found when primes were presented for 1000 ms so that they were clearly visible. These results indicate that priming in a masked perceptual identification task is the result of automatic processes and is not affected by strategies. The present paradigm provides a valuable alternative to more commonly used tasks such as lexical decision.

  11. Differential cognitive processing of Kanji and Kana words: do orthographic and semantic codes function in parallel in word matching task.

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    Kawakami, A; Hatta, T; Kogure, T

    2001-12-01

    Relative engagements of the orthographic and semantic codes in Kanji and Hiragana word recognition were investigated. In Exp. 1, subjects judged whether the pairs of Kanji words (prime and target) presented sequentially were physically identical to each other in the word condition. In the sentence condition, subjects decided whether the target word was valid for the prime sentence presented in advance. The results showed that the response times to the target swords orthographically similar (to the prime) were significantly slower than to semantically related target words in the word condition and that this was also the case in the sentence condition. In Exp. 2, subjects judged whether the target word written in Hiragana was physically identical to the prime word in the word condition. In the sentence condition, subjects decided if the target word was valid for the previously presented prime sentence. Analysis indicated that response times to orthographically similar words were slower than to semantically related words in the word condition but not in the sentence condition wherein the response times to the semantically and orthographically similar words were largely the same. Based on these results, differential contributions of orthographic and semantic codes in cognitive processing of Japanese Kanji and Hiragana words was discussed.

  12. Different Loci of Semantic Interference in Picture Naming vs. Word-Picture Matching Tasks

    OpenAIRE

    Harvey, Denise Y.; Schnur, Tatiana T.

    2016-01-01

    Naming pictures and matching words to pictures belonging to the same semantic category impairs performance relative to when stimuli come from different semantic categories (i.e., semantic interference). Despite similar semantic interference phenomena in both picture naming and word-picture matching tasks, the locus of interference has been attributed to different levels of the language system – lexical in naming and semantic in word-picture matching. Although both tasks involve access to shar...

  13. Reading "glasses" will prime "vision," but reading a pair of "glasses" will not.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Neely, J H; VerWys, C A; Kahan, T A

    1998-01-01

    In a lexical decision task with two primes and a target, the target was preceded 300 msec by the second prime (P2) which in turn was preceded by a brief forward and backward masked first prime (P1). When P1 and P2 were unrelated, reaction times were faster when the target was related to P2 (e.g., wave SALT ... pepper) than when the target was unrelated to P2 (and P1--e.g., wave LOAN ... pepper). However, this semantic priming effect was reduced to statistically nonsignificant levels when P1 and P2 were repetitions of the same word. That is, priming did not occur for salt SALT ... pepper relative to loan LOAN ... pepper. This reduction in priming was observed whether P2 and the target were strongly or weakly related. These findings raise problems for current accounts of semantic priming.

  14. Facial Features Can Induce Emotion: Evidence from Affective Priming Tasks

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    Chia-Chen Wu

    2011-05-01

    Full Text Available Our previous study found that schematic faces with direct gazes, with mouths, with horizontal oval eyes, or without noses, tend to be perceived as in negative emotion. In this study we further explore these factors by the affective priming task. Faces were taking as prime, and positive or negative words were probe. The task was to judge the valence of the probe. If the faces could induce emotions, a target word with the same emotional valence should be judged faster than with opposite valence (the congruency effect. Experiment 1 used the most positive and negative rated faces in previous study as the primes. The positive faces were with vertical oval eyes and without mouth, while the negative faces were with horizontal eyes and with mouth. Results of 34 participants showed that those faces indeed elicited congruency effects. Experiment 2 manipulated gaze directions (N = 16. After the task the participants were asked to rate the prime faces. According to their rating, faces with direct gaze was perceive as positive, and elicited congruency effect with positive words in affective priming task. Our data thus support the conjecture that shape of eyes, the existence of mouths, and gaze directions could induces emotion.

  15. Development and validation of a set of German stimulus- and target words for an attachment related semantic priming paradigm.

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    Anke Maatz

    Full Text Available Experimental research in adult attachment theory is faced with the challenge to adequately activate the adult attachment system. In view of the multitude of methods employed for this purpose so far, this paper suggests to further make use of the methodological advantages of semantic priming. In order to enable the use of such a paradigm in a German speaking context, a set of German words belonging to the semantic categories 'interpersonal closeness', 'interpersonal distance' and 'neutral' were identified and their semantics were validated combining production- and rating method. 164 university students answered corresponding online-questionnaires. Ratings were analysed using analysis of variance (ANOVA and cluster analysis from which three clearly distinct groups emerged. Beyond providing validated stimulus- and target words which can be used to activate the adult attachment system in a semantic priming paradigm, the results of this study point at important links between attachment and stress which call for further investigation in the future.

  16. Abnormal N400 Semantic Priming Effect May Reflect Psychopathological Processes in Schizophrenia: A Twin Study

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    Anuradha Sharma

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available Objective. Activation of semantic networks is indexed by the N400 effect. We used a twin study design to investigate whether N400 effect abnormalities reflect genetic/trait liability or are related to psychopathological processes in schizophrenia. Methods. We employed robust linear regression to compare N400 and behavioral priming effects across 36 monozygotic twin pairs (6 pairs concordant for schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder, 11 discordant pairs, and 19 healthy control pairs performing a lexical decision task. Moreover, we examined the correlation between Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS score and the N400 effect and the influence of medication status on this effect. Results. Regression yielded a significant main effect of group on the N400 effect only in the direct priming condition (p=0.003. Indirect condition and behavioral priming effect showed no significant effect of group. Planned contrasts with the control group as a reference group revealed that affected concordant twins had significantly reduced N400 effect compared to controls, and discordant affected twins had a statistical trend for reduced N400 effect compared to controls. The unaffected twins did not differ significantly from the controls. There was a trend for correlation between reduced N400 effect and higher BPRS scores, and the N400 effect did not differ significantly between medicated and unmedicated patients. Conclusions. Reduced N400 effect may reflect disease-specific processes in schizophrenia implicating frontotemporal brain network in schizophrenia pathology.

  17. Localizing semantic interference from distractor sounds in picture naming: A dual-task study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mädebach, Andreas; Kieseler, Marie-Luise; Jescheniak, Jörg D

    2017-10-13

    In this study we explored the locus of semantic interference in a novel picture-sound interference task in which participants name pictures while ignoring environmental distractor sounds. In a previous study using this task (Mädebach, Wöhner, Kieseler, & Jescheniak, in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43, 1629-1646, 2017), we showed that semantically related distractor sounds (e.g., BARKING dog ) interfere with a picture-naming response (e.g., "horse") more strongly than unrelated distractor sounds do (e.g., DRUMMING drum ). In the experiment reported here, we employed the psychological refractory period (PRP) approach to explore the locus of this effect. We combined a geometric form classification task (square vs. circle; Task 1) with the picture-sound interference task (Task 2). The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the tasks was systematically varied (0 vs. 500 ms). There were three central findings. First, the semantic interference effect from distractor sounds was replicated. Second, picture naming (in Task 2) was slower with the short than with the long task SOA. Third, both effects were additive-that is, the semantic interference effects were of similar magnitude at both task SOAs. This suggests that the interference arises during response selection or later stages, not during early perceptual processing. This finding corroborates the theory that semantic interference from distractor sounds reflects a competitive selection mechanism in word production.

  18. Grammatical markers switch roles and elicit different electrophysiological responses under shallow and deep semantic requirements.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Soshi, Takahiro; Nakajima, Heizo; Hagiwara, Hiroko

    2016-10-01

    Static knowledge about the grammar of a natural language is represented in the cortico-subcortical system. However, the differences in dynamic verbal processing under different cognitive conditions are unclear. To clarify this, we conducted an electrophysiological experiment involving a semantic priming paradigm in which semantically congruent or incongruent word sequences (prime nouns-target verbs) were randomly presented. We examined the event-related brain potentials that occurred in response to congruent and incongruent target words that were preceded by primes with or without grammatical case markers. The two participant groups performed either the shallow (lexical judgment) or deep (direct semantic judgment) semantic tasks. We hypothesized that, irrespective of the case markers, the congruent targets would reduce centro-posterior N400 activities under the deep semantic condition, which induces selective attention to the semantic relatedness of content words. However, the same congruent targets with correct case markers would reduce lateralized negativity under the shallow semantic condition because grammatical case markers are related to automatic structural integration under semantically unattended conditions. We observed that congruent targets (e.g., 'open') that were preceded by primes with congruent case markers (e.g., 'shutter-object case') reduced lateralized negativity under the shallow semantic condition. In contrast, congruent targets, irrespective of case markers, consistently yielded N400 reductions under the deep semantic condition. To summarize, human neural verbal processing differed in response to the same grammatical markers in the same verbal expressions under semantically attended or unattended conditions.

  19. Dissociation between the activity of the right middle frontal gyrus and the middle temporal gyrus in processing semantic priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Laufer, Ilan; Negishi, Michiro; Lacadie, Cheryl M; Papademetris, Xenophon; Constable, R Todd

    2011-01-01

    The aim of this event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to test whether the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and middle temporal gyrus (MTG) would show differential sensitivity to the effect of prime-target association strength on repetition priming. In the experimental condition (RP), the target occurred after repetitive presentation of the prime within an oddball design. In the control condition (CTR), the target followed a single presentation of the prime with equal probability of the target as in RP. To manipulate semantic overlap between the prime and the target both conditions (RP and CTR) employed either the onomatopoeia "oink" as the prime and the referent "pig" as the target (OP) or vice-versa (PO) since semantic overlap was previously shown to be greater in OP. The results showed that the left MTG was sensitive to release of adaptation while both the right MTG and MFG were sensitive to sequence regularity extraction and its verification. However, dissociated activity between OP and PO was revealed in RP only in the right MFG. Specifically, target "pig" (OP) and the physically equivalent target in CTR elicited comparable deactivations whereas target "oink" (PO) elicited less inhibited response in RP than in CTR. This interaction in the right MFG was explained by integrating these effects into a competition model between perceptual and conceptual effects in priming processing.

  20. Dissociation between the activity of the right middle frontal gyrus and the middle temporal gyrus in processing semantic priming.

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    Ilan Laufer

    Full Text Available The aim of this event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI study was to test whether the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG and middle temporal gyrus (MTG would show differential sensitivity to the effect of prime-target association strength on repetition priming. In the experimental condition (RP, the target occurred after repetitive presentation of the prime within an oddball design. In the control condition (CTR, the target followed a single presentation of the prime with equal probability of the target as in RP. To manipulate semantic overlap between the prime and the target both conditions (RP and CTR employed either the onomatopoeia "oink" as the prime and the referent "pig" as the target (OP or vice-versa (PO since semantic overlap was previously shown to be greater in OP. The results showed that the left MTG was sensitive to release of adaptation while both the right MTG and MFG were sensitive to sequence regularity extraction and its verification. However, dissociated activity between OP and PO was revealed in RP only in the right MFG. Specifically, target "pig" (OP and the physically equivalent target in CTR elicited comparable deactivations whereas target "oink" (PO elicited less inhibited response in RP than in CTR. This interaction in the right MFG was explained by integrating these effects into a competition model between perceptual and conceptual effects in priming processing.

  1. Sharing one biographical detail elicits priming between famous names: Empirical and computational approaches

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    Matthias eIhrke

    2011-05-01

    Full Text Available In this paper three experiments and corresponding model simulations are reported that investigate the priming of famous name recognition in order to explore the structure of the part of the semantic system dealing with people. Consistent with empirical findings, novel computational simulations using Burton et al.'s interactive activation and competition model point to a conceptual distinction between how priming is initiated in single- and double-familiarity tasks, indicating that priming should be weaker or non-existent for the single-familiarity task. Experiment One demonstrates that, within a double-familiarity framework using famous names, categorial and associative priming are reliable effects. Pushing the model to the limit, it predicts that pairs of celebrities who are neither associatively- nor categorially-related but who share single biographical features, both died in a car crash for example, should prime each other. Experiment Two investigated this in a double familiarity task but the effect was not observed. We therefore simulated and realized a pairwise learning task that was conceptually similar to the double-familiarity decision task but allowed to strengthen the underlying connections. Priming based on a single biographical feature could be found both in simulations and the experiment. The effect was not due to visual or name similarity which were controlled for and participants did not report using the biographical links between the people to learn the pairs. The results are interpreted to lend further support to structural models of the memory for persons. Furthermore, the results are consistent with the idea that episodic features known about people are stored in semantic memory and are automatically activated when encountering that person.

  2. Repetition Priming Magnitude Depends on Affirmative Prime Responses: A Test of Two Congruity Explanations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fiet, Paula; Sorensen, Linda; Mayne, Zachary; Corgiat, Damon; Woltz, Dan

    2016-01-01

    We conducted 2 experiments to evaluate the impact of positive prime responses on repetition priming effects while decoupling this impact from content congruity and specific evaluation operations. Our first experiment consisted of word-meaning comparison trials that required participants to evaluate synonyms or antonyms. A crossing of evaluation operation with semantic content allowed us to test the goal-content congruity hypothesis against the semantic congruity explanation for greater facilitation from positive response primes. Results suggested that operation-based priming is affected by goal-content congruity. A second experiment tested the observed effect of positive responses on repetition priming using mental rotation of irregular shapes, affording a test of the impact of congruity in evaluation goals and content in a nonverbal stimulus domain. Both experiments produced a pattern of results inconsistent with Schulman's (1974) semantic congruity account and instead implicated a different form of congruity that affects memory for prior operations rather than memory for semantic and episodic content.

  3. Tracking lexical consolidation with ERPs: Lexical and semantic-priming effects on N400 and LPC responses to newly-learned words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bakker, Iske; Takashima, Atsuko; van Hell, Janet G; Janzen, Gabriele; McQueen, James M

    2015-12-01

    Novel words can be recalled immediately and after little exposure, but require a post-learning consolidation period to show word-like behaviour such as lexical competition. This pattern is thought to reflect a qualitative shift from episodic to lexical representations. However, several studies have reported immediate effects of meaningful novel words on semantic processing, suggesting that integration of novel word meanings may not require consolidation. The current study synthesises and extends these findings by showing a dissociation between lexical and semantic effects on the electrophysiological (N400, LPC) response to novel words. The difference in N400 amplitude between novel and existing words (a lexical effect) decreased significantly after a 24-h consolidation period, providing novel support for the hypothesis that offline consolidation aids lexicalisation. In contrast, novel words preceded by semantically related primes elicited a more positive LPC response (a semantic-priming effect) both before and after consolidation, indicating that certain semantic effects can be observed even when words have not been fully lexicalised. We propose that novel meanings immediately start to contribute to semantic processing, but that the underlying neural processes may shift from strategic to more automatic with consolidation. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  4. When canary primes yellow: effects of semantic memory on overt attention.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Léger, Laure; Chauvet, Elodie

    2015-02-01

    This study explored how overt attention is influenced by the colour that is primed when a target word is read during a lexical visual search task. Prior studies have shown that attention can be influenced by conceptual or perceptual overlap between a target word and distractor pictures: attention is attracted to pictures that have the same form (rope--snake) or colour (green--frog) as the spoken target word or is drawn to an object from the same category as the spoken target word (trumpet--piano). The hypothesis for this study was that attention should be attracted to words displayed in the colour that is primed by reading a target word (for example, yellow for canary). An experiment was conducted in which participants' eye movements were recorded whilst they completed a lexical visual search task. The primary finding was that participants' eye movements were mainly directed towards words displayed in the colour primed by reading the target word, even though this colour was not relevant to completing the visual search task. This result is discussed in terms of top-down guidance of overt attention in visual search for words.

  5. Grammatical markers switch roles and elicit different electrophysiological responses under shallow and deep semantic requirements

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Takahiro Soshi

    2016-10-01

    Full Text Available Static knowledge about the grammar of a natural language is represented in the cortico-subcortical system. However, the differences in dynamic verbal processing under different cognitive conditions are unclear. To clarify this, we conducted an electrophysiological experiment involving a semantic priming paradigm in which semantically congruent or incongruent word sequences (prime nouns–target verbs were randomly presented. We examined the event-related brain potentials that occurred in response to congruent and incongruent target words that were preceded by primes with or without grammatical case markers. The two participant groups performed either the shallow (lexical judgment or deep (direct semantic judgment semantic tasks. We hypothesized that, irrespective of the case markers, the congruent targets would reduce centro-posterior N400 activities under the deep semantic condition, which induces selective attention to the semantic relatedness of content words. However, the same congruent targets with correct case markers would reduce lateralized negativity under the shallow semantic condition because grammatical case markers are related to automatic structural integration under semantically unattended conditions. We observed that congruent targets (e.g., ‘open' that were preceded by primes with congruent case markers (e.g., ‘shutter-object case' reduced lateralized negativity under the shallow semantic condition. In contrast, congruent targets, irrespective of case markers, consistently yielded N400 reductions under the deep semantic condition. To summarize, human neural verbal processing differed in response to the same grammatical markers in the same verbal expressions under semantically attended or unattended conditions. Keyword: Neuroscience

  6. Space-Valence Priming with Subliminal and Supraliminal Words

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    Ulrich eAnsorge

    2013-02-01

    Full Text Available To date it is unclear whether (1 awareness-independent non-evaluative semantic processes influence affective semantics and whether (2 awareness-independent affective semantics influence non-evaluative semantic processing. In the current study, we investigated these questions with the help of subliminal (masked primes and visible targets in a space-valence across-category congruence effect. In line with (1, we found that subliminal space prime words influenced valence classification of supraliminal target words (Experiment 1: Classifications were faster with a congruent prime (e.g., the prime ‘up’ before the target ‘happy’ than with an incongruent prime (e.g., the prime ‘up’ before the target ‘sad’. In contrast to (2, no influence of subliminal valence primes on the classification of supraliminal space targets into up- and down-words was found (Experiment 2. Control conditions showed that standard masked response-priming effects were found with both subliminal prime types, and that an across-category congruence effect was also found with supraliminal valence primes and spatial target words. The final Experiment 3 confirmed that the across-category congruence effect indeed reflected priming of target categorization of a relevant meaning category. Together, the data jointly confirmed prediction (1 that awareness-independent non-evaluative semantic priming influences valence judgments.

  7. Getting connected: Both associative and semantic links structure semantic memory for newly learned persons.

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    Wiese, Holger; Schweinberger, Stefan R

    2015-01-01

    The present study examined whether semantic memory for newly learned people is structured by visual co-occurrence, shared semantics, or both. Participants were trained with pairs of simultaneously presented (i.e., co-occurring) preexperimentally unfamiliar faces, which either did or did not share additionally provided semantic information (occupation, place of living, etc.). Semantic information could also be shared between faces that did not co-occur. A subsequent priming experiment revealed faster responses for both co-occurrence/no shared semantics and no co-occurrence/shared semantics conditions, than for an unrelated condition. Strikingly, priming was strongest in the co-occurrence/shared semantics condition, suggesting additive effects of these factors. Additional analysis of event-related brain potentials yielded priming in the N400 component only for combined effects of visual co-occurrence and shared semantics, with more positive amplitudes in this than in the unrelated condition. Overall, these findings suggest that both semantic relatedness and visual co-occurrence are important when novel information is integrated into person-related semantic memory.

  8. Priming trait inferences through pictures and moving pictures: the impact of open and closed mindsets.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fiedler, Klaus; Schenck, Wolfram; Watling, Marlin; Menges, Jochen I

    2005-02-01

    A newly developed paradigm for studying spontaneous trait inferences (STI) was applied in 3 experiments. The authors primed dyadic stimulus behaviors involving a subject (S) and an object (O) person through degraded pictures or movies. An encoding task called for the verification of either a graphical feature or a semantic interpretation, which either fit or did not fit the primed behavior. Next, participants had to identify a trait word that appeared gradually behind a mask and that either matched or did not match the primed behavior. STI effects, defined as shorter identification latencies for matching than nonmatching traits, were stronger for S than for O traits, after graphical rather than semantic encoding decisions and after encoding failures. These findings can be explained by assuming that trait inferences are facilitated by open versus closed mindsets supposed to result from distracting (graphical) encoding tasks or encoding failures (involving nonfitting interpretations).

  9. Reduced N400 Semantic Priming Effects in Adult Survivors of Paediatric and Adolescent Traumatic Brain Injury

    Science.gov (United States)

    Knuepffer, C.; Murdoch, B. E.; Lloyd, D.; Lewis, F. M.; Hinchliffe, F. J.

    2012-01-01

    The immediate and long-term neural correlates of linguistic processing deficits reported following paediatric and adolescent traumatic brain injury (TBI) are poorly understood. Therefore, the current research investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited during a semantic picture-word priming experiment in two groups of highly functioning…

  10. Lexical-Semantic Processing and Reading: Relations between Semantic Priming, Visual Word Recognition and Reading Comprehension

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nobre, Alexandre de Pontes; de Salles, Jerusa Fumagalli

    2016-01-01

    The aim of this study was to investigate relations between lexical-semantic processing and two components of reading: visual word recognition and reading comprehension. Sixty-eight children from private schools in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from 7 to 12 years, were evaluated. Reading was assessed with a word/nonword reading task and a reading…

  11. Mechanisms of subliminal response priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kiesel, Andrea; Kunde, Wilfried; Hoffmann, Joachim

    2008-07-15

    Subliminal response priming has been considered to operate on several stages, e.g. perceptual, central or motor stages might be affected. While primes' impact on target perception has been clearly demonstrated, semantic response priming recently has been thrown into doubt (e.g. Klinger, Burton, & Pitts, 2000). Finally, LRP studies have revealed that subliminal primes evoke motor processes. Yet, the premises for such prime-evoked motor activation are not settled. A transfer of priming to stimuli that have never been presented as targets appears particularly interesting because it suggests a level of processing that goes beyond a reactivation of previously acquired S-R links. Yet, such transfer has not always withstood empirical testing. To account for these contradictory results, we proposed a two-process model (Kunde, Kiesel, & Hoffmann, 2003): First, participants build up expectations regarding imperative stimuli for the required responses according to experience and/or instructions. Second, stimuli that match these "action triggers" directly activate the corresponding motor responses irrespective of their conscious identification. In line with these assumptions, recent studies revealed that non-target primes induce priming when they fit the current task intentions and when they are expected in the experimental setting.

  12. An fMRI study of semantic processing in men with schizophrenia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kubicki, M.; McCarley, R.W.; Nestor, P.G.; Huh, T.; Kikinis, R.; Shenton, M.E.; Wible, C.G.

    2009-01-01

    As a means toward understanding the neural bases of schizophrenic thought disturbance, we examined brain activation patterns in response to semantically and superficially encoded words in patients with schizophrenia. Nine male schizophrenic and 9 male control subjects were tested in a visual levels of processing (LOP) task first outside the magnet and then during the fMRI scanning procedures (using a different set of words). During the experiments visual words were presented under two conditions. Under the deep, semantic encoding condition, subjects made semantic judgments as to whether the words were abstract or concrete. Under the shallow, nonsemantic encoding condition, subjects made perceptual judgments of the font size (uppercase/lowercase) of the presented words. After performance of the behavioral task, a recognition test was used to assess the depth of processing effect, defined as better performance for semantically encoded words than for perceptually encoded words. For the scanned version only, the words for both conditions were repeated in order to assess repetition-priming effects. Reaction times were assessed in both testing scenarios. Both groups showed the expected depth of processing effect for recognition, and control subjects showed the expected increased activation of the left inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPC) under semantic encoding relative to perceptual encoding conditions as well as repetition priming for semantic conditions only. In contrast, schizophrenics showed similar patterns of fMRI activation regardless of condition. Most striking in relation to controls, patients showed decreased LIFC activation concurrent with increased left superior temporal gyrus activation for semantic encoding versus shallow encoding. Furthermore, schizophrenia subjects did not show the repetition priming effect, either behaviorally or as a decrease in LIPC activity. In patients with schizophrenia, LIFC underactivation and left superior temporal gyrus

  13. An fMRI study of semantic processing in men with schizophrenia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kubicki, M; McCarley, R W; Nestor, P G; Huh, T; Kikinis, R; Shenton, M E; Wible, C G

    2003-12-01

    As a means toward understanding the neural bases of schizophrenic thought disturbance, we examined brain activation patterns in response to semantically and superficially encoded words in patients with schizophrenia. Nine male schizophrenic and 9 male control subjects were tested in a visual levels of processing (LOP) task first outside the magnet and then during the fMRI scanning procedures (using a different set of words). During the experiments visual words were presented under two conditions. Under the deep, semantic encoding condition, subjects made semantic judgments as to whether the words were abstract or concrete. Under the shallow, nonsemantic encoding condition, subjects made perceptual judgments of the font size (uppercase/lowercase) of the presented words. After performance of the behavioral task, a recognition test was used to assess the depth of processing effect, defined as better performance for semantically encoded words than for perceptually encoded words. For the scanned version only, the words for both conditions were repeated in order to assess repetition-priming effects. Reaction times were assessed in both testing scenarios. Both groups showed the expected depth of processing effect for recognition, and control subjects showed the expected increased activation of the left inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPC) under semantic encoding relative to perceptual encoding conditions as well as repetition priming for semantic conditions only. In contrast, schizophrenics showed similar patterns of fMRI activation regardless of condition. Most striking in relation to controls, patients showed decreased LIFC activation concurrent with increased left superior temporal gyrus activation for semantic encoding versus shallow encoding. Furthermore, schizophrenia subjects did not show the repetition priming effect, either behaviorally or as a decrease in LIPC activity. In patients with schizophrenia, LIFC underactivation and left superior temporal gyrus

  14. Semantic Priming During Sentence Processing by Young and Older Adults.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Burke, Deborah M.; Yee, Penny L.

    1984-01-01

    Compares the semantic processing skills of younger adults (mean age 25) and older adults (mean age 68). After reading a sentence, subjects performed a task in which responses did not depend on retention. Results provided no evidence for age-related changes, including those associated with access to implied information. (Author/RH)

  15. Automatic Priming Effects for New Associations in Lexical Decision and Perceptual Identification

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    D. Pecher (Diane); J.G.W. Raaijmakers (Jeroen)

    1999-01-01

    textabstractInformation storage in semantic memory was investigated by looking at automatic priming effects for new associations in two experiments. In the study phase word pairs were presented in a paired-associate learning task. Lexical decision and perceptual identification were used to examine

  16. Effect of handedness on the occurrence of semantic N400 priming effect in 18- and 24-month-old children

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jacqueline eFagard

    2014-04-01

    Full Text Available It is frequently stated that right-handedness reflects hemispheric dominance for language. Indeed, most right-handers process phonological aspects of language with the left hemisphere (and other aspects with the right hemisphere. However, given the overwhelming majority of right-handers and of individuals showing left-hemisphere language dominance, there is a high probability to be right-handed and at the same time process phonology within the left hemisphere even if there was no causal link between both. One way to understand the link between handedness and language lateralization is to observe how they co-develop. In this study, we investigated to what extent handedness is related to the occurrence of a right-hemisphere lateralized N400 event related potential in a semantic priming task in children. The N400 component in a semantic priming task is more negative for unrelated than for related word pairs. We have shown earlier that N400 effect occurred in 24-month-olds over the right parietal-occipital recording sites, whereas no significant effect was obtained over the left hemisphere sites. In 18-month-olds, this effect was observed only in those children with higher word production ability. Since handedness has also been associated with the vocabulary size at these ages, we investigated the relationship between the N400 and handedness in 18- and 24-months as a function of their vocabulary. The results showed that right-handers had significantly higher vocabulary size and more pronounced N400 effect over the right hemisphere than non-lateralized children, but only in the 18-month-old group. We propose that the emergences of right-handedness and right-distributed N400 effect are not causally related, but that both developmental processes reflect a general tendency to recruit the hemispheres in a lateralized manner. The lack of this relationship at 24 months further suggests that there is no direct causal relation between handedness and language

  17. Perceptual and Conceptual Priming of Cue Encoding in Task Switching

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schneider, Darryl W.

    2016-01-01

    Transition effects in task-cuing experiments can be partitioned into task switching and cue repetition effects by using multiple cues per task. In the present study, the author shows that cue repetition effects can be partitioned into perceptual and conceptual priming effects. In 2 experiments, letters or numbers in their uppercase/lowercase or…

  18. Anchors as Semantic Primes in Value Construction: An EEG Study of the Anchoring Effect.

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    Qingguo Ma

    Full Text Available Previous research regarding anchoring effects has demonstrated that human judgments are often assimilated to irrelevant information. Studies have demonstrated that anchors influence the economic valuation of various products and experiences; however, the cognitive explanations of this effect remain controversial, and its neural mechanisms have rarely been explored. In the current study, we conducted an electroencephalography (EEG experiment to investigate the anchoring effect on willingness to accept (WTA for an aversive hedonic experience and the role of anchors in this judgment heuristic. The behavioral results demonstrated that random numbers affect participants' WTA for listening to pieces of noise. The participants asked for higher pay after comparing their WTA with higher numbers. The EEG results indicated that anchors also influenced the neural underpinnings of the valuation process. Specifically, when a higher anchor number was drawn, larger P2 and late positive potential amplitudes were elicited, reflecting the anticipation of more intensive pain from the subsequent noise. Moreover, higher anchors induced a stronger theta band power increase compared with lower anchors when subjects listened to the noises, indicating that the participants felt more unpleasant during the actual experience of the noise. The levels of unpleasantness during both anticipation and experience were consistent with the semantic information implied by the anchors. Therefore, these data suggest that a semantic priming process underlies the anchoring effect in WTA. This study provides proof for the robustness of the anchoring effect and neural evidence of the semantic priming model. Our findings indicate that activated contextual information, even seemingly irrelevant, can be embedded in the construction of economic value in the brain.

  19. Semantic interference in picture naming during dual-task performance does not vary with reading ability.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Piai, Vitória; Roelofs, Ardi; Roete, Ingeborg

    2015-01-01

    Previous dual-task studies examining the locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming have obtained diverging results. In these studies, participants manually responded to tones and named pictures while ignoring distractor words (picture-word interference, PWI) with varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between tone and PWI stimulus. Whereas some studies observed no semantic interference at short SOAs, other studies observed effects of similar magnitude at short and long SOAs. The absence of semantic interference in some studies may perhaps be due to better reading skill of participants in these than in the other studies. According to such a reading-ability account, participants' reading skill should be predictive of the magnitude of their interference effect at short SOAs. To test this account, we conducted a dual-task study with tone discrimination and PWI tasks and measured participants' reading ability. The semantic interference effect was of similar magnitude at both short and long SOAs. Participants' reading ability was predictive of their naming speed but not of their semantic interference effect, contrary to the reading ability account. We conclude that the magnitude of semantic interference in picture naming during dual-task performance does not depend on reading skill.

  20. Happiness as a belief system: individual differences and priming in emotion judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Robinson, Michael D; Kirkeby, Ben S

    2005-08-01

    Three studies involving 104 undergraduates sought to examine how an individual's level of life satisfaction organizes their knowledge concerning the self's emotions. Participants judged the self's positive and negative emotions within a computerized task. Key results sought to determine whether judging two positive emotions in a consecutive sequence speeds the second judgment--a pattern of priming that would suggest a tighter, more interconnected structure in semantic memory related to one's positive emotions. As expected, individual differences in life satisfaction predicted the magnitude of this priming effect (Studies 1 & 2), which appeared to be unique to judgments of the self's emotions (Study 3). The results indicate that happy, relative to less happy, individuals organize information concerning their positive emotions in a qualitatively different and tighter semantic manner.

  1. The facilitation effect of associative and semantic relatedness in word recognition

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    Jakić Milena

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available In this study we addressed three issues concerning semantic and associative relatedness between two words and how they prime each other. The first issue is whether there is a priming effect of semantic relatedness over and above the effect of associative relatedness. The second issue is how difference in semantic overlap between two words affects priming. In order to specify the semantic overlap we introduce five relation types that differ in number of common semantic components. Three relation types (synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms represent semantic relatedness while two relation types represent associative relatedness, with negligible or no semantic relatedness. Finally, the third issue addressed in this study is whether there is a symmetric priming effect if we swap the position of prime and target, i.e. whether the direction of relatedness between two words affects priming. In two lexical decision experiments we presented five types of word pairs. In both experiments we obtained stronger facilitation for pairs that were both semantically and associatively related. Closer inspection showed that larger semantic overlap between words is paralleled by greater facilitation effect. The effects did not change when prime and target swap their position, indicating that the observed facilitation effects are symmetrical. This outcome complies with predictions of distributed models of memory.

  2. The effect of level of processing on perceptual and conceptual priming: control versus closed-head-injured patients.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vakil, E; Sigal, J

    1997-07-01

    Twenty-four closed-head-injured (CHI) and 24 control participants studied two word lists under shallow (i.e., nonsemantic) and deep (i.e., semantic) encoding conditions. They were then tested on free recall, perceptual priming (i.e., perceptual partial word identification) and conceptual priming (i.e., category production) tasks. Previous findings have demonstrated that memory in CHI is characterized by inefficient conceptual processing of information. It was thus hypothesized that the CHI participants would perform more poorly than the control participants on the explicit and on the conceptual priming tasks. On these tasks the CHI group was expected to benefit to a lesser degree from prior deep encoding, as compared to controls. The groups were not expected to significantly differ from each other on the perceptual priming task. Prior deep encoding was not expected to improve the perceptual priming performance of either group. All findings were as predicted, with the exception that a significant effect was not found between groups for deep encoding in the conceptual priming task. The results are discussed (1) in terms of their theoretical contribution in further validating the dissociation between perceptual and conceptual priming; and (2) in terms of the contribution in differentiating between amnesic and CHI patients. Conceptual priming is preserved in amnesics but not in CHI patients.

  3. Age-Related Differences in Face Recognition: Neural Correlates of Repetition and Semantic Priming in Young and Older Adults

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wiese, Holger; Komes, Jessica; Tüttenberg, Simone; Leidinger, Jana; Schweinberger, Stefan R.

    2017-01-01

    Difficulties in person recognition are among the common complaints associated with cognitive ageing. The present series of experiments therefore investigated face and person recognition in young and older adults. The authors examined how within-domain and cross-domain repetition as well as semantic priming affect familiar face recognition and…

  4. Priming in a free association task as a function of association directionality.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zeelenberg, R; Shiffrin, R M; Raaijmakers, J G

    1999-11-01

    Two experiments investigated priming in free association, a conceptual implicit memory task. The stimuli consisted of bidirectionally associated word pairs (e.g., BEACH-SAND) and unidirectionally associated word pairs that have no association from the target response back to the stimulus cue (e.g., BONE-DOG). In the study phase, target words (e.g., SAND, DOG) were presented in an incidental learning task. In the test phase, participants generated an associate to the stimulus cues (e.g., BEACH, BONE). In both experiments, priming was obtained for targets (e.g., SAND) that had an association back to the cue, but not for targets (e.g., DOG) for which such a backward association was absent. These results are problematic for theoretical accounts that attribute priming in free association to the strengthening of target responses. It is argued that priming in free association depends on the strengthening of cue-target associations.

  5. Bilateral robotic priming before task-oriented approach in subacute stroke rehabilitation: a pilot randomized controlled trial.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hsieh, Yu-Wei; Wu, Ching-Yi; Wang, Wei-En; Lin, Keh-Chung; Chang, Ku-Chou; Chen, Chih-Chi; Liu, Chien-Ting

    2017-02-01

    To investigate the treatment effects of bilateral robotic priming combined with the task-oriented approach on motor impairment, disability, daily function, and quality of life in patients with subacute stroke. A randomized controlled trial. Occupational therapy clinics in medical centers. Thirty-one subacute stroke patients were recruited. Participants were randomly assigned to receive bilateral priming combined with the task-oriented approach (i.e., primed group) or to the task-oriented approach alone (i.e., unprimed group) for 90 minutes/day, 5 days/week for 4 weeks. The primed group began with the bilateral priming technique by using a bimanual robot-aided device. Motor impairments were assessed by the Fugal-Meyer Assessment, grip strength, and the Box and Block Test. Disability and daily function were measured by the modified Rankin Scale, the Functional Independence Measure, and actigraphy. Quality of life was examined by the Stroke Impact Scale. The primed and unprimed groups improved significantly on most outcomes over time. The primed group demonstrated significantly better improvement on the Stroke Impact Scale strength subscale ( p = 0.012) and a trend for greater improvement on the modified Rankin Scale ( p = 0.065) than the unprimed group. Bilateral priming combined with the task-oriented approach elicited more improvements in self-reported strength and disability degrees than the task-oriented approach by itself. Further large-scale research with at least 31 participants in each intervention group is suggested to confirm the study findings.

  6. Suggestibility and negative priming: two replication studies.

    Science.gov (United States)

    David, Daniel; Brown, Richard J

    2002-07-01

    Research suggests that inhibiting the effect of irrelevant stimuli on subsequent thought and action (cognitive inhibition) may be an important component of suggestibility. Two small correlation studies were conducted to address the relationship between different aspects of suggestibility and individual differences in cognitive inhibition, operationalized as the degree of negative priming generated by to-be-ignored stimuli in a semantic categorization task. The first study found significant positive correlations between negative priming, hypnotic suggestibility, and creative imagination; a significant negative correlation was obtained between negative priming and interrogative suggestibility, demonstrating the discriminant validity of the study results. The second study replicated the correlation between negative priming and hypnotic suggestibility, using a different suggestibility measurement procedure that assessed subjective experience and hypnotic involuntariness as well as objective responses to suggestions. These studies support the notion that the ability to engage in cognitive inhibition may be an important component of hypnotic responsivity and maybe of other forms of suggestibility.

  7. Priming methods in semantics and pragmatics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Maldonado, Mora; Spector, Benjamin; Chemla, Emmanuel

    2017-01-01

    Structural priming is a powerful method to inform linguistic theories. We argue that this method extends nicely beyond syntax to theories of meaning. Priming, however, should still be seen as only one of the tools available for linguistic data collection. Specifically, because priming can occur at different, potentially conflicting levels, it cannot detect every aspect of linguistic representations.

  8. Control Deficit Subjects are Superior for Man-Made Objects on a Verbal Semantic Task

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Carlos Roncero

    2014-04-01

    Full Text Available When semantic deficits occur following brain damage, the subjects generally show anomia as well as deficits on semantic matching tasks such as the Camels and Cactus test. Such individuals can be further characterized as demonstrating either a semantic control deficit or a storage deficit (Jeffries & Lambon Ralph, 2006. Semantic control subjects show improved performance when responses are constrained, but storage subjects do not. In the present study, we categorized 17 subjects with neurodegenerative diseases – Alzheimer’s disease and Primary Progressive Aphasia - as Semantic Storage or Semantic Control patterns of deficit, based on their performance on three semantic tasks—Naming, Cued Naming, and Word-to-Picture Matching. This was done independent of both the subject’s localization of brain damage and clinical diagnosis. Subjects who demonstrated impaired performance on the Naming task, but showed normal performance on Cued Naming and Word-to-Picture Matching, were classified as showing a control deficit (N = 8, while subjects who were impaired on all three semantic tasks were classified as anomic subjects with a storage deficit (N = 9. Despite only using these three semantic tasks, the identified sub-groups demonstrated different patterns of semantic knowledge consistent with either a control deficit or a storage deficit. The identified sub-groups, for example, were comparable for letter fluency, but subjects with a storage deficit were significantly worse for animal fluency. Accessing subjects’ semantic knowledge with the word and picture versions of the Camels and Cactus test, we also found that storage deficit subjects’ performance was equally poor on both versions compared to normal elderly participants, whereas control deficit subjects were relatively impaired only in the word version. Finally, comparing FDG PET scans for these subjects, we noted storage deficit subjects typically had bilateral temporal damage—all but one

  9. Where perception meets memory: a review of repetition priming in visual search tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kristjánsson, Arni; Campana, Gianluca

    2010-01-01

    What we have recently seen and attended to strongly influences how we subsequently allocate visual attention. A clear example is how repeated presentation of an object's features or location in visual search tasks facilitates subsequent detection or identification of that item, a phenomenon known as priming. Here, we review a large body of results from priming studies that suggest that a short-term implicit memory system guides our attention to recently viewed items. The nature of this memory system and the processing level at which visual priming occurs are still debated. Priming might be due to activity modulations of low-level areas coding simple stimulus characteristics or to higher level episodic memory representations of whole objects or visual scenes. Indeed, recent evidence indicates that only minor changes to the stimuli used in priming studies may alter the processing level at which priming occurs. We also review recent behavioral, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological evidence that indicates that the priming patterns are reflected in activity modulations at multiple sites along the visual pathways. We furthermore suggest that studies of priming in visual search may potentially shed important light on the nature of cortical visual representations. Our conclusion is that priming occurs at many different levels of the perceptual hierarchy, reflecting activity modulations ranging from lower to higher levels, depending on the stimulus, task, and context-in fact, the neural loci that are involved in the analysis of the stimuli for which priming effects are seen.

  10. Design issues in the semantics and scheduling of asynchronous tasks.

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Olivier, Stephen L.

    2013-07-01

    The asynchronous task model serves as a useful vehicle for shared memory parallel programming, particularly on multicore and manycore processors. As adoption of model among programmers has increased, support has emerged for the integration of task parallel language constructs into mainstream programming languages, e.g., C and C++. This paper examines some of the design decisions in Cilk and OpenMP concerning semantics and scheduling of asynchronous tasks with the aim of informing the efforts of committees considering language integration, as well as developers of new task parallel languages and libraries.

  11. The neural substrates of musical memory revealed by fMRI and two semantic tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Groussard, M; Rauchs, G; Landeau, B; Viader, F; Desgranges, B; Eustache, F; Platel, H

    2010-12-01

    Recognizing a musical excerpt without necessarily retrieving its title typically reflects the existence of a memory system dedicated to the retrieval of musical knowledge. The functional distinction between musical and verbal semantic memory has seldom been investigated. In this fMRI study, we directly compared the musical and verbal memory of 20 nonmusicians, using a congruence task involving automatic semantic retrieval and a familiarity task requiring more thorough semantic retrieval. In the former, participants had to access their semantic store to retrieve musical or verbal representations of melodies or expressions they heard, in order to decide whether these were then given the right ending or not. In the latter, they had to judge the level of familiarity of musical excerpts and expressions. Both tasks revealed activation of the left inferior frontal and posterior middle temporal cortices, suggesting that executive and selection processes are common to both verbal and musical retrievals. Distinct patterns of activation were observed within the left temporal cortex, with musical material mainly activating the superior temporal gyrus and verbal material the middle and inferior gyri. This cortical organization of musical and verbal semantic representations could explain clinical dissociations featuring selective disturbances for musical or verbal material. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  12. Conceptual and non-conceptual repetition priming in category exemplar generation: Evidence from bilinguals.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Francis, Wendy S; Fernandez, Norma P; Bjork, Robert A

    2010-10-01

    One measure of conceptual implicit memory is repetition priming in the generation of exemplars from a semantic category, but does such priming transfer across languages? That is, do the overlapping conceptual representations for translation equivalents provide a sufficient basis for such priming? In Experiment 1 (N=96) participants carried out a deep encoding task, and priming between languages was statistically reliable, but attenuated, relative to within-language priming. Experiment 2 (N=96) replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and assessed the contributions of conceptual and non-conceptual processes using a levels-of-processing manipulation. Words that underwent shallow encoding exhibited within-language, but not between-language, priming. Priming in shallow conditions cannot therefore be explained by incidental activation of the concept. Instead, part of the within-language priming effect, even under deep-encoding conditions, is due to increased availability of language-specific lemmas or phonological word forms.

  13. Memory for emotional words: The role of semantic relatedness, encoding task and affective valence.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ferré, Pilar; Fraga, Isabel; Comesaña, Montserrat; Sánchez-Casas, Rosa

    2015-01-01

    Emotional stimuli have been repeatedly demonstrated to be better remembered than neutral ones. The aim of the present study was to test whether this advantage in memory is mainly produced by the affective content of the stimuli or it can be rather accounted for by factors such as semantic relatedness or type of encoding task. The valence of the stimuli (positive, negative and neutral words that could be either semantically related or unrelated) as well as the type of encoding task (focused on either familiarity or emotionality) was manipulated. The results revealed an advantage in memory for emotional words (either positive or negative) regardless of semantic relatedness. Importantly, this advantage was modulated by the encoding task, as it was reliable only in the task which focused on emotionality. These findings suggest that congruity with the dimension attended at encoding might contribute to the superiority in memory for emotional words, thus offering us a more complex picture of the underlying mechanisms behind the advantage for emotional information in memory.

  14. Superficial Priming in Episodic Recognition

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dopkins, Stephen; Sargent, Jesse; Ngo, Catherine T.

    2010-01-01

    We explored the effect of superficial priming in episodic recognition and found it to be different from the effect of semantic priming in episodic recognition. Participants made recognition judgments to pairs of items, with each pair consisting of a prime item and a test item. Correct positive responses to the test item were impeded if the prime…

  15. Does the presence of priming hinder subsequent recognition or recall performance?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stark, Shauna M; Gordon, Barry; Stark, Craig E L

    2008-02-01

    Declarative and non-declarative memories are thought be supported by two distinct memory systems that are often posited not to interact. However, Wagner, Maril, and Schacter (2000a) reported that at the time priming was assessed, greater behavioural and neural priming was associated with lower levels of subsequent recognition memory, demonstrating an interaction between declarative and non-declarative memory. We examined this finding using a similar paradigm, in which participants made the same or different semantic word judgements following a short or long lag and subsequent memory test. We found a similar overall pattern of results, with greater behavioural priming associated with a decrease in recognition and recall performance. However, neither various within-participant nor various between-participant analyses revealed significant correlations between priming and subsequent memory performance. These data suggest that both lag and task have effects on priming and declarative memory performance, but that they are largely independent and occur in parallel.

  16. Stroop Interference in a Delayed Match-to-Sample Task: Evidence for Semantic Competition

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    Bradley R. Sturz

    2013-11-01

    Full Text Available Discussions of the source of the Stroop interference effect continue to pervade the literature. Semantic competition posits that interference results from competing semantic activation of word and color dimensions of the stimulus prior to response selection. Response competition posits that interference results from competing responses for articulating the word dimension versus the color dimension at the time of response selection. We embedded Stroop stimuli into a delayed match-to-sample task in an attempt to test semantic and response competition accounts of the interference effect. Participants viewed a sample color word in black or colored fonts that were congruent or incongruent with respect to the color word itself. After a 5s delay, participants were presented with two targets (i.e., a match and a foil and were instructed to select the correct match. We probed each dimension independently during target presentations via color targets (i.e., two colors or word targets (i.e., two words and manipulated whether the semantic content of the foil was related to the semantic content of the irrelevant sample dimension (e.g., word sample red in blue font with the word red as the match and the word blue as the foil. We provide evidence for Stroop interference such that response times increased for incongruent trials even in the presence of a response option with semantic content unrelated to the semantic content of the irrelevant sample dimension. Accuracy also deteriorated during the related foil trials. A follow-up experiment with a 10s delay between sample and targets replicated the results. Results appear to provide converging evidence for Stroop interference in a delayed match-to-sample task in a manner that is consistent with an explanation based upon semantic competition and inconsistent with an explanation based upon response competition.

  17. Target Categorization with Primes that Vary in Both Congruency and Sense Modality

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Kathryn eWeatherford

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available In two experiments we examined conceptual priming within and across sense modalities by varying the modality (picture and environmental sounds and the category congruency of prime-target pairs. Both experiments used a repetition priming paradigm, but Experiment 1 studied priming effects with a task that required a superordinate categorization response (man-made or natural, while Experiment 2 used a lower-level category response (musical instruments or animal: one that was more closely associated with the basic level of the semantic network. Results from Experiment 1 showed a strong effect of target modality and two distinct patterns of conceptual priming effects with picture and environmental sound targets. However, no priming advantage was found when congruent and incongruent primes were compared. Results from Experiment 2, found congruency effects that were specific to environmental sound targets when preceded by picture primes. The findings provide support for the intermodal event file and multisensory framework, and suggest that auditory and visual features about a single item in a conceptual category may be more tightly connected than two different items from the same category.

  18. The Effect of Signal-to-Noise Ratio on Linguistic Processing in a Semantic Judgment Task: An Aging Study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stanley, Nicholas; Davis, Tara; Estis, Julie

    2017-03-01

    Aging effects on speech understanding in noise have primarily been assessed through speech recognition tasks. Recognition tasks, which focus on bottom-up, perceptual aspects of speech understanding, intentionally limit linguistic and cognitive factors by asking participants to only repeat what they have heard. On the other hand, linguistic processing tasks require bottom-up and top-down (linguistic, cognitive) processing skills and are, therefore, more reflective of speech understanding abilities used in everyday communication. The effect of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on linguistic processing ability is relatively unknown for either young (YAs) or older adults (OAs). To determine if reduced SNRs would be more deleterious to the linguistic processing of OAs than YAs, as measured by accuracy and reaction time in a semantic judgment task in competing speech. In the semantic judgment task, participants indicated via button press whether word pairs were a semantic Match or No Match. This task was performed in quiet, as well as, +3, 0, -3, and -6 dB SNR with two-talker speech competition. Seventeen YAs (20-30 yr) with normal hearing sensitivity and 17 OAs (60-68 yr) with normal hearing sensitivity or mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss within age-appropriate norms. Accuracy, reaction time, and false alarm rate were measured and analyzed using a mixed design analysis of variance. A decrease in SNR level significantly reduced accuracy and increased reaction time in both YAs and OAs. However, poor SNRs affected accuracy and reaction time of Match and No Match word pairs differently. Accuracy for Match pairs declined at a steeper rate than No Match pairs in both groups as SNR decreased. In addition, reaction time for No Match pairs increased at a greater rate than Match pairs in more difficult SNRs, particularly at -3 and -6 dB SNR. False-alarm rates indicated that participants had a response bias to No Match pairs as the SNR decreased. Age-related differences were

  19. Extraversion and reward-related processing: probing incentive motivation in affective priming tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Robinson, Michael D; Moeller, Sara K; Ode, Scott

    2010-10-01

    Based on an incentive motivation theory of extraversion (Depue & Collins, 1999), it was hypothesized that extraverts (relative to introverts) would exhibit stronger positive priming effects in affective priming tasks, whether involving words or pictures. This hypothesis was systematically supported in four studies involving 229 undergraduates. In each of the four studies, and in a subsequent combined analysis, extraversion was positively predictive of positive affective priming effects, but was not predictive of negative affective priming effects. The results bridge an important gap in the literature between biological and trait models of incentive motivation and do so in a way that should be informative to subsequent efforts to understand the processing basis of extraversion as well as incentive motivation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

  20. Effortful semantic decision-making boosts memory performance in older adults.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fu, Li; Maes, Joseph H R; Varma, Samarth; Kessels, Roy P C; Daselaar, Sander M

    2017-04-01

    A major concern in age-related cognitive decline is episodic memory (EM). Previous studies indicate that both resource and binding deficits contribute to EM decline. Environmental support by task manipulations encouraging stronger cognitive effort and deeper levels of processing may facilitate compensation for these two deficits. To clarify factors that can counteract age-related EM decline, we assessed effects of cognitive effort (four levels) and level of processing (LoP, shallow/deep) during encoding on subsequent retrieval. Young (YAs, N = 23) and older (OAs, N = 23) adults performed two incidental encoding tasks, deep/semantic and shallow/perceptual. Cognitive effort was manipulated by varying decision-making demands. EM performance, indexed by d-prime, was later tested using a recognition task. Results showed that regardless of LoP, increased cognitive effort caused higher d-primes in both age groups. Compared to YAs, OAs showed a lower d-prime after shallow encoding across all cognitive effort levels, and after deep encoding with low cognitive effort. Deep encoding with higher levels of cognitive effort completely eliminated these age differences. Our findings support an environmental-compensatory account of cognitive ageing and can have important therapeutic implications.

  1. Semantic and translation priming from a first language to a second and back: Making sense of the findings

    OpenAIRE

    Schoonbaert, Sofie; Duyck, Wouter; Brysbaert, Marc; Hartsuiker, Robert

    2009-01-01

    The present study investigated cross-language priming effects with unique noncognate translation pairs. Unbalanced Dutch (first language [L1])-English (second language [L2]) bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in a masked priming paradigm. The results of two experiments showed significant translation priming from L I to L2 (meisje-GIRL) and from L2 to L I (girl-MEISJE), using two different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (250 and 100 msec). Although translation priming from L I to...

  2. Relating UMLS semantic types and task-based ontology to computer-interpretable clinical practice guidelines.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kumar, Anand; Ciccarese, Paolo; Quaglini, Silvana; Stefanelli, Mario; Caffi, Ezio; Boiocchi, Lorenzo

    2003-01-01

    Medical knowledge in clinical practice guideline (GL) texts is the source of task-based computer-interpretable clinical guideline models (CIGMs). We have used Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic types (STs) to understand the percentage of GL text which belongs to a particular ST. We also use UMLS semantic network together with the CIGM-specific ontology to derive a semantic meaning behind the GL text. In order to achieve this objective, we took nine GL texts from the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) and marked up the text dealing with a particular ST. The STs we took into consideration were restricted taking into account the requirements of a task-based CIGM. We used DARPA Agent Markup Language and Ontology Inference Layer (DAML + OIL) to create the UMLS and CIGM specific semantic network. For the latter, as a bench test, we used the 1999 WHO-International Society of Hypertension Guidelines for the Management of Hypertension. We took into consideration the UMLS STs closest to the clinical tasks. The percentage of the GL text dealing with the ST "Health Care Activity" and subtypes "Laboratory Procedure", "Diagnostic Procedure" and "Therapeutic or Preventive Procedure" were measured. The parts of text belonging to other STs or comments were separated. A mapping of terms belonging to other STs was done to the STs under "HCA" for representation in DAML + OIL. As a result, we found that the three STs under "HCA" were the predominant STs present in the GL text. In cases where the terms of related STs existed, they were mapped into one of the three STs. The DAML + OIL representation was able to describe the hierarchy in task-based CIGMs. To conclude, we understood that the three STs could be used to represent the semantic network of the task-bases CIGMs. We identified some mapping operators which could be used for the mapping of other STs into these.

  3. The functional connectivity of semantic task changes in the recovery from stroke aphasia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lu, Jie; Wu, Xia; Yao, Li; Li, Kun-Cheng; Shu, Hua; Dong, Qi

    2007-03-01

    Little is known about the difference of functional connectivity of semantic task between the recovery aphasic patients and normal subject. In this paper, an fMRI experiment was performed in a patient with aphasia following a left-sided ischemic lesion and normal subject. Picture naming was used as semantic activation task in this study. We compared the preliminary functional connectivity results of the recovery aphasic patient with the normal subject. The fMRI data were separated by independent component analysis (ICA) into 90 components. According to our experience and other papers, we chose a region of interest (ROI) of semantic (x=-57, y=15, z=8, r=11mm). From the 90 components, we chose one component as the functional connectivity of the semantic ROI according to one criterion. The criterion is the mean value of the voxels in the ROI. So the component of the highest mean value of the ROI is the functional connectivity of the ROI. The voxel with its value higher than 2.4 was thought as activated (pgyrus and inferior/middle temporal gyrus are larger than the ones of normal. The activated area of the right inferior frontal gyrus is smaller than the ones of normal. The functional connectivity of stroke aphasic patient under semantic condition is different with the normal one. The focus of the stroke aphasic patient can affect the functional connectivity.

  4. Masked priming effect reflects evidence accumulated by the prime.

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    Kinoshita, Sachiko; Norris, Dennis

    2010-01-01

    In the same-different match task, masked priming is observed with the same responses but not different responses. Norris and Kinoshita's (2008) Bayesian reader account of masked priming explains this pattern based on the same principle as that explaining the absence of priming for nonwords in the lexical decision task. The pattern of priming follows from the way the model makes optimal decisions in the two tasks; priming does not depend on first activating the prime and then the target. An alternative explanation is in terms of a bias towards responding "same" that exactly counters the facilitatory effect of lexical access. The present study tested these two views by varying both the degree to which the prime predicts the response and the visibility of the prime. Unmasked primes produced effects expected from the view that priming is influenced by the degree to which the prime predicts the response. In contrast, with masked primes, the size of priming for the same response was completely unaffected by predictability. These results rule out response bias as an explanation of the absence of masked priming for different responses and, in turn, indicate that masked priming is not a consequence of automatic lexical access of the prime.

  5. Priming can affect naming colours using the study-test procedure. Revealing the role of task conflict.

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    Sharma, Dinkar

    2016-11-14

    The Stroop paradigm has been widely used to study attention whilst its use to explore implicit memory have been mixed. Using the non-colour word Stroop task we tested contrasting predictions from the proactive-control/task-conflict model (Kalanthroff, Avnit, Henik, Davelaar & Usher, 2015) that implicate response conflict and task conflict for the priming effects. Using the study-test procedure 60 native English speakers were tested to determine whether priming effects from words that had previously been studied would cause interference when presented in a colour naming task. The results replicate a finding by MacLeod (1996) who showed no differences between the response latencies to studied and unstudied words. However, this pattern was predominately in the first half of the study where it was also found that both studied and unstudied words in a mixed block were slower to respond to than a block of pure unstudied words. The second half of the study showed stronger priming interference effects as well as a sequential modulation effect in which studied words slowed down the responses of studied words on the next trial. We discuss the role of proactive and reactive control processes and conclude that task conflict best explains the pattern of priming effects reported. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier B.V.

  6. When Stroop helps Piaget: An inter-task positive priming paradigm in 9-year-old children.

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    Linzarini, A; Houdé, O; Borst, G

    2015-11-01

    To determine whether inhibitory control is domain general or domain specific in school children, we asked 40 9-year-old children to perform an inter-task priming paradigm in which they responded to Stroop items on the primes and to Piaget number conservation items on the probes. The children were more efficient in the inhibition of a misleading "length-equals-number" heuristic in the number conservation task if they had successfully inhibited a previous prepotent reading response in the Stroop task. This study provides evidence that the inhibitory control ability of school children generalizes to distinct cognitive domains, that is, verbal for the Stroop task and logico-mathematical for Piaget's number conservation task. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  7. Generation and Perceptual Implicit Memory: Different Generation Tasks Produce Different Effects on Perceptual Priming

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    Mulligan, Neil W.; Dew, Ilana T. Z.

    2009-01-01

    The generation manipulation has been critical in delineating differences between implicit and explicit memory. In contrast to past research, the present experiments indicate that generating from a rhyme cue produces as much perceptual priming as does reading. This is demonstrated for 3 visual priming tasks: perceptual identification, word-fragment…

  8. Reexamining unconscious response priming: A liminal-prime paradigm.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Avneon, Maayan; Lamy, Dominique

    2018-03-01

    Research on the limits of unconscious processing typically relies on the subliminal-prime paradigm. However, this paradigm is limited in the issues it can address. Here, we examined the implications of using the liminal-prime paradigm, which allows comparing unconscious and conscious priming with constant stimulation. We adapted an iconic demonstration of unconscious response priming to the liminal-prime paradigm. On the one hand, temporal attention allocated to the prime and its relevance to the task increased the magnitude of response priming. On the other hand, the longer RTs associated with the dual task inherent to the paradigm resulted in response priming being underestimated, because unconscious priming effects were shorter-lived than conscious-priming effects. Nevertheless, when the impact of long RTs was alleviated by considering the fastest trials or by imposing a response deadline, conscious response priming remained considerably larger than unconscious response priming. These findings suggest that conscious perception strongly modulates response priming. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  9. Episodic and Semantic Memory Contribute to Familiar and Novel Episodic Future Thinking.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wang, Tong; Yue, Tong; Huang, Xi Ting

    2016-01-01

    Increasing evidence indicates that episodic future thinking (EFT) relies on both episodic and semantic memory; however, event familiarity may importantly affect the extent to which episodic and semantic memory contribute to EFT. To test this possibility, two behavioral experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, we directly compared the proportion of episodic and semantic memory used in an EFT task. The results indicated that more episodic memory was used when imagining familiar future events compared with novel future events. Conversely, significantly more semantic memory was used when imagining novel events compared with familiar events. Experiment 2 aimed to verify the results of Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, we found that familiarity moderated the effect of priming the episodic memory system on EFT; particularly, it increased the time required to construct a standard familiar episodic future event, but did not significantly affect novel episodic event reaction time. Collectively, these findings support the hypothesis that event familiarity importantly moderates episodic and semantic memory's contribution to EFT.

  10. The effect of childhood bilingualism on episodic and semantic memory tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kormi-Nouri, Reza; Shojaei, Razie-Sadat; Moniri, Sadegheh; Gholami, Ali-Reza; Moradi, Ali-Reza; Akbari-Zardkhaneh, Saeed; Nilsson, Lars-Göran

    2008-04-01

    Kormi-Nouri, Moniri and Nilsson (2003) demonstrated that Swedish-Persian bilingual children recalled at a higher level than Swedish monolingual children, when they were tested using Swedish materials. The present study was designed to examine the bilingual advantage of children who use different languages in their everyday life but have the same cultural background and live in their communities in the same way as monolingual children. In four experiments, 488 monolingual and bilingual children were compared with regard to episodic and semantic memory tasks. In experiments 1 and 2 there were 144 boys and 144 girls in three school groups (aged 9-10 years, 13-14 years and 16-17 years) and in three language groups (Persian monolingual, Turkish-Persian bilingual, and Kurdish-Persian bilingual). In experiments 3 and 4, there were 200 male students in two school groups (aged 9-10 years and 16-17 years) and in two language groups (Persian monolingual and Turkish-Persian bilingual). In the episodic memory task, children learned sentences (experiments 1-3) and words (Experiment 4). Letter and category fluency tests were used as measures of semantic memory. To change cognitive demands in memory tasks, in Experiment 1, the integration of nouns and verbs within sentences was manipulated by the level of association between verb and noun in each sentence. At retrieval, a recognition test was used. In experiments 2 and 3, the organization between sentences was manipulated at encoding in Experiment 2 and at both encoding and retrieval in Experiment 3 through the use of categories among the objects. At retrieval, free recall or cued recall tests were employed. In Experiment 4, the bilingual children were tested with regard to both their first and their second language. In all four experiments, a positive effect of bilingualism was found on episodic and semantic memory tasks; the effect was more pronounced for older than younger children. The bilingual advantage was not affected by

  11. Graded effects of regularity in language revealed by N400 indices of morphological priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kielar, Aneta; Joanisse, Marc F

    2010-07-01

    Differential electrophysiological effects for regular and irregular linguistic forms have been used to support the theory that grammatical rules are encoded using a dedicated cognitive mechanism. The alternative hypothesis is that language systematicities are encoded probabilistically in a way that does not categorically distinguish rule-like and irregular forms. In the present study, this matter was investigated more closely by focusing specifically on whether the regular-irregular distinction in English past tenses is categorical or graded. We compared the ERP priming effects of regulars (baked-bake), vowel-change irregulars (sang-sing), and "suffixed" irregulars that display a partial regularity (suffixed irregular verbs, e.g., slept-sleep), as well as forms that are related strictly along formal or semantic dimensions. Participants performed a visual lexical decision task with either visual (Experiment 1) or auditory prime (Experiment 2). Stronger N400 priming effects were observed for regular than vowel-change irregular verbs, whereas suffixed irregulars tended to group with regular verbs. Subsequent analyses decomposed early versus late-going N400 priming, and suggested that differences among forms can be attributed to the orthographic similarity of prime and target. Effects of morphological relatedness were observed in the later-going time period, however, we failed to observe true regular-irregular dissociations in either experiment. The results indicate that morphological effects emerge from the interaction of orthographic, phonological, and semantic overlap between words.

  12. The Influence of Working Memory Load on Expectancy-Based Strategic Processes in the Stroop-Priming Task.

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    Ortells, Juan J; Álvarez, Dolores; Noguera, Carmen; Carmona, Encarna; de Fockert, Jan W

    2017-01-01

    The present study investigated whether a differential availability of cognitive control resources as a result of varying working memory (WM) load could affect the capacity for expectancy-based strategic actions. Participants performed a Stroop-priming task in which a prime word (GREEN or RED) was followed by a colored target (red vs. green) that participants had to identify. The prime was incongruent or congruent with the target color on 80 and 20% of the trials, respectively, and participants were informed about the differential proportion of congruent vs. incongruent trials. This task was interleaved with a WM task, such that the prime word was preceded by a sequence of either a same digit repeated five times (low load) or five different random digits (high load), which should be retained by participants. After two, three, or four Stroop trials, they had to decide whether or not a probe digit was a part of the memory set. The key finding was a significant interaction between prime-target congruency and WM load: Whereas a strategy-dependent (reversed Stroop) effect was found under low WM load, a standard Stroop interference effect was observed under high WM load. These findings demonstrate that the availability of WM is crucial for implementing expectancy-based strategic actions.

  13. Negative Priming Effect after Inhibition of Weight/Number Interference in a Piaget-Like Task

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    Schirlin, Olivier; Houde, Olivier

    2007-01-01

    Piagetian tasks have more to do with the child's ability to inhibit interference than they do with the ability to grasp their underlying logic. Here we used a chronometric paradigm with 11-year-olds, who succeed in Piaget's conservation-of-weight task, to test the role of cognitive inhibition in a priming version of this classical task. The…

  14. Priming in implicit memory tasks: prior study causes enhanced discriminability, not only bias.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zeelenberg, René; Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan M; Raaijmakers, Jeroen G W

    2002-03-01

    R. Ratcliff and G. McKoon (1995, 1996, 1997; R. Ratcliff, D. Allbritton, & G. McKoon, 1997) have argued that repetition priming effects are solely due to bias. They showed that prior study of the target resulted in a benefit in a later implicit memory task. However, prior study of a stimulus similar to the target resulted in a cost. The present study, using a 2-alternative forced-choice procedure, investigated the effect of prior study in an unbiased condition: Both alternatives were studied prior to their presentation in an implicit memory task. Contrary to a pure bias interpretation of priming, consistent evidence was obtained in 3 implicit memory tasks (word fragment completion, auditory word identification, and picture identification) that performance was better when both alternatives were studied than when neither alternative was studied. These results show that prior study results in enhanced discriminability, not only bias.

  15. Priming T2 in a Visual and Auditory Attentional Blink Task

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Burg, E. van der; Olivers, C.N.L.; Bronkhorst, A.W.; Theeuwes, J.

    2008-01-01

    Participants performed an attentional blink (AB) task including digits as targets and letters as distractors within the visual and auditory domains. Prior to the rapid serial visual presentation, a visual or auditory prime was presented in the form of a digit that was identical to the second target

  16. To predict or not to predict: influences of task and strategy on the processing of semantic relations.

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    Roehm, Dietmar; Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina; Rösler, Frank; Schlesewsky, Matthias

    2007-08-01

    We report a series of event-related potential experiments designed to dissociate the functionally distinct processes involved in the comprehension of highly restricted lexical-semantic relations (antonyms). We sought to differentiate between influences of semantic relatedness (which are independent of the experimental setting) and processes related to predictability (which differ as a function of the experimental environment). To this end, we conducted three ERP studies contrasting the processing of antonym relations (black-white) with that of related (black-yellow) and unrelated (black-nice) word pairs. Whereas the lexical-semantic manipulation was kept constant across experiments, the experimental environment and the task demands varied: Experiment 1 presented the word pairs in a sentence context of the form The opposite of X is Y and used a sensicality judgment. Experiment 2 used a word pair presentation mode and a lexical decision task. Experiment 3 also examined word pairs, but with an antonymy judgment task. All three experiments revealed a graded N400 response (unrelated > related > antonyms), thus supporting the assumption that semantic associations are processed automatically. In addition, the experiments revealed that, in highly constrained task environments, the N400 gradation occurs simultaneously with a P300 effect for the antonym condition, thus leading to the superficial impression of an extremely "reduced" N400 for antonym pairs. Comparisons across experiments and participant groups revealed that the P300 effect is not only a function of stimulus constraints (i.e., sentence context) and experimental task, but that it is also crucially influenced by individual processing strategies used to achieve successful task performance.

  17. Facial and semantic emotional interference: A pilot study on the behavioral and cortical responses to the dual valence association task

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    Petroni Agustín

    2011-04-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Integration of compatible or incompatible emotional valence and semantic information is an essential aspect of complex social interactions. A modified version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT called Dual Valence Association Task (DVAT was designed in order to measure conflict resolution processing from compatibility/incompatibly of semantic and facial valence. The DVAT involves two emotional valence evaluative tasks which elicits two forms of emotional compatible/incompatible associations (facial and semantic. Methods Behavioural measures and Event Related Potentials were recorded while participants performed the DVAT. Results Behavioural data showed a robust effect that distinguished compatible/incompatible tasks. The effects of valence and contextual association (between facial and semantic stimuli showed early discrimination in N170 of faces. The LPP component was modulated by the compatibility of the DVAT. Conclusions Results suggest that DVAT is a robust paradigm for studying the emotional interference effect in the processing of simultaneous information from semantic and facial stimuli.

  18. Naming and categorizing objects: task differences modulate the polarity of semantic effects in the picture-word interference paradigm.

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    Hantsch, Ansgar; Jescheniak, Jörg D; Mädebach, Andreas

    2012-07-01

    The picture-word interference paradigm is a prominent tool for studying lexical retrieval during speech production. When participants name the pictures, interference from semantically related distractor words has regularly been shown. By contrast, when participants categorize the pictures, facilitation from semantically related distractors has typically been found. In the extant studies, however, differences in the task instructions (naming vs. categorizing) were confounded with the response level: While responses in naming were typically located at the basic level (e.g., "dog"), responses were located at the superordinate level in categorization (e.g., "animal"). The present study avoided this confound by having participants respond at the basic level in both naming and categorization, using the same pictures, distractors, and verbal responses. Our findings confirm the polarity reversal of the semantic effects--that is, semantic interference in naming, and semantic facilitation in categorization. These findings show that the polarity reversal of the semantic effect is indeed due to the different tasks and is not an artifact of the different response levels used in previous studies. Implications for current models of language production are discussed.

  19. Multisensory integration in complete unawareness: evidence from audiovisual congruency priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Faivre, Nathan; Mudrik, Liad; Schwartz, Naama; Koch, Christof

    2014-11-01

    Multisensory integration is thought to require conscious perception. Although previous studies have shown that an invisible stimulus could be integrated with an audible one, none have demonstrated integration of two subliminal stimuli of different modalities. Here, pairs of identical or different audiovisual target letters (the sound /b/ with the written letter "b" or "m," respectively) were preceded by pairs of masked identical or different audiovisual prime digits (the sound /6/ with the written digit "6" or "8," respectively). In three experiments, awareness of the audiovisual digit primes was manipulated, such that participants were either unaware of the visual digit, the auditory digit, or both. Priming of the semantic relations between the auditory and visual digits was found in all experiments. Moreover, a further experiment showed that unconscious multisensory integration was not obtained when participants did not undergo prior conscious training of the task. This suggests that following conscious learning, unconscious processing suffices for multisensory integration. © The Author(s) 2014.

  20. Effects of Forward and Backward Contextual Elaboration on Lexical Inferences: Evidence from a Semantic Relatedness Judgment Task

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    Hamada, Akira

    2015-01-01

    Three experiments examined whether the process of lexical inferences differs according to the direction of contextual elaboration using a semantic relatedness judgment task. In Experiment 1, Japanese university students read English sentences where target unknown words were semantically elaborated by prior contextual information (forward lexical…

  1. Facilitation and interference in naming: A consequence of the same learning process?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hughes, Julie W; Schnur, Tatiana T

    2017-08-01

    Our success with naming depends on what we have named previously, a phenomenon thought to reflect learning processes. Repeatedly producing the same name facilitates language production (i.e., repetition priming), whereas producing semantically related names hinders subsequent performance (i.e., semantic interference). Semantic interference is found whether naming categorically related items once (continuous naming) or multiple times (blocked cyclic naming). A computational model suggests that the same learning mechanism responsible for facilitation in repetition creates semantic interference in categorical naming (Oppenheim, Dell, & Schwartz, 2010). Accordingly, we tested the predictions that variability in semantic interference is correlated across categorical naming tasks and is caused by learning, as measured by two repetition priming tasks (picture-picture repetition priming, Exp. 1; definition-picture repetition priming, Exp. 2, e.g., Wheeldon & Monsell, 1992). In Experiment 1 (77 subjects) semantic interference and repetition priming effects were robust, but the results revealed no relationship between semantic interference effects across contexts. Critically, learning (picture-picture repetition priming) did not predict semantic interference effects in either task. We replicated these results in Experiment 2 (81 subjects), finding no relationship between semantic interference effects across tasks or between semantic interference effects and learning (definition-picture repetition priming). We conclude that the changes underlying facilitatory and interfering effects inherent to lexical access are the result of distinct learning processes where multiple mechanisms contribute to semantic interference in naming. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  2. When Wine and Apple Both Help the Production of Grapes: ERP Evidence for Post-lexical Semantic Facilitation in Picture Naming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Python, Grégoire; Fargier, Raphaël; Laganaro, Marina

    2018-01-01

    Background : Producing a word in referential naming requires to select the right word in our mental lexicon among co-activated semantically related words. The mechanisms underlying semantic context effects during speech planning are still controversial, particularly for semantic facilitation which investigation remains under-represented in contrast to the plethora of studies dealing with interference. Our aim is to study the time-course of semantic facilitation in picture naming, using a picture-word "interference" paradigm and event-related potentials (ERPs). Methods : We compared two different types of semantic relationships, associative and categorical, in a single word priming and a double word priming paradigm. The primes were presented visually with a long negative Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA), which is expected to cause facilitation. Results : Shorter naming latencies were observed after both associative and categorical primes, as compared to unrelated primes, and even shorter latencies after two primes. Electrophysiological results showed relatively late modulations of waveform amplitudes for both types of primes (beginning ~330 ms post picture onset with a single prime and ~275 ms post picture onset with two primes), corresponding to a shift in latency of similar topographic maps across conditions. Conclusion : The present results are in favor of a post-lexical locus of semantic facilitation for associative and categorical priming in picture naming and confirm that semantic facilitation is as relevant as semantic interference to inform on word production. The post-lexical locus argued here might be related to self-monitoting or/and to modulations at the level of word-form planning, without excluding the participation of strategic processes.

  3. Towards Universal Semantic Tagging

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Abzianidze, Lasha; Bos, Johan

    2017-01-01

    The paper proposes the task of universal semantic tagging---tagging word tokens with language-neutral, semantically informative tags. We argue that the task, with its independent nature, contributes to better semantic analysis for wide-coverage multilingual text. We present the initial version of

  4. Smelly primes – when olfactory primes do or do not work

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Monique A Smeets

    2014-02-01

    Full Text Available In applied olfactory cognition the effects that olfactory stimulation can have on (human behavior are investigated. To enable an efficient application of olfactory stimuli a model of how they may lead to a change in behavior is proposed. To this end we use the concept of olfactory priming. Olfactory priming may prompt a special view on priming as the olfactory sense has some unique properties which make odors special types of primes. Examples of such properties are the ability of odors to influence our behavior outside of awareness, to lead to strong affective evaluations, to evoke specific memories, and to associate easily and quickly to other environmental stimuli. Opportunities and limitations for using odors as primes are related to these properties, and alternative explanations for reported findings are offered. Implications for olfactory semantic, construal, behavior and goal priming are given based on a brief overview of the priming literature from social psychology and from olfactory perception science. We end by formulating recommendations and ideas for a future research agenda and applications for olfactory priming.

  5. Lexical selection in the semantically blocked cyclic naming task: The role of cognitive control and learning

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jason E. Crowther

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available Studies of semantic interference in language production have provided evidence for a role of cognitive control mechanisms in regulating the activation of semantic competitors during naming. The present study investigated the relationship between individual differences in cognitive control abilities, for both younger and older adults, and the degree of semantic interference in a blocked cyclic naming task. We predicted that individuals with lower working memory capacity (as measured by word span, lesser ability to inhibit distracting responses (as measured by Stroop interference, and a lesser ability to resolve proactive interference (as measured by a recent negatives task would show a greater increase in semantic interference in naming, with effects being larger for older adults. Instead, measures of cognitive control were found to relate to specific indices of semantic interference in the naming task, rather than overall degree of semantic interference, and few interactions with age were found, with younger and older adults performing similarly. The increase in naming latencies across naming trials within a cycle were negatively correlated with word span for both related and unrelated conditions, suggesting a strategy of narrowing response alternatives based upon memory for the set of item names. Evidence for a role of inhibition in response selection was obtained, as Stroop interference correlated positively with the change in naming latencies across cycles for the related, but not unrelated, condition. In contrast, recent negatives interference correlated negatively with the change in naming latencies across unrelated cycles, suggesting that individual differences in this tap the degree of strengthening of links in a lexical network based upon prior exposure. Results are discussed in terms of current models of lexical selection and consequences for word retrieval in more naturalistic production.

  6. Social priming of dyslexia and reduction of the Stroop effect: what component of the Stroop effect is actually reduced?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Augustinova, Maria; Ferrand, Ludovic

    2014-03-01

    Recently, Goldfarb, Aisenberg, and Henik (2011) showed that in a manual format of the Stroop task, dyslexia priming eliminates the normal magnitude of the interference-based Stroop-like findings otherwise exhibited by individuals participating in such research. Goldfarb et al. (2011) consequently concluded that the effect of word reading in a Stroop task (i.e., one automatic behavior) can be effectively controlled through an automatic instruction "do not read" (i.e., another automatic behavior). The present study further investigated these ideas by examining when and how dyslexia priming controls different processes involved in a Stroop task. To this end, the original finding was first replicated (Experiment 1) and subsequently extended to the vocal (instead of manual) response modality to examine whether previously reported eliminations of the Stroop effect persist with this response format (i.e., format producing larger Stroop effects). Since past work (e.g., Augustinova & Ferrand, 2012a; Brown, Joneleit et al., 2002; Ferrand & Augustinova, 2013) had suggested that various interventions were likely to reduce (rather than eliminate) the interference-based Stroop-like findings with vocal responses, a further aim of these experiments was to identify the component of these findings that dyslexia priming actually reduces. To this end, the effects of this intervention were examined in a more fine-grained variant of the Stroop task that distinguished between interference resulting from task-irrelevant processes involved in computing the lexical and semantic representations of the word (i.e., a written distractor to ignore) and task-relevant processes involved in the selection of a response (i.e., a color target to name) that are both involved in this task. In line with our past work (e.g., Augustinova & Ferrand, 2012a; Ferrand & Augustinova, 2013), the results of two experiments (Experiments 2 and 3) showed that in the vocal format, dyslexia priming reduces but does not

  7. Locus of Semantic Interference in Picture Naming: Evidence from Dual-Task Performance

    Science.gov (United States)

    Piai, Vitória; Roelofs, Ardi; Schriefers, Herbert

    2014-01-01

    Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

  8. Semantic memory in object use.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Silveri, Maria Caterina; Ciccarelli, Nicoletta

    2009-10-01

    We studied five patients with semantic memory disorders, four with semantic dementia and one with herpes simplex virus encephalitis, to investigate the involvement of semantic conceptual knowledge in object use. Comparisons between patients who had semantic deficits of different severity, as well as the follow-up, showed that the ability to use objects was largely preserved when the deficit was mild but progressively decayed as the deficit became more severe. Naming was generally more impaired than object use. Production tasks (pantomime execution and actual object use) and comprehension tasks (pantomime recognition and action recognition) as well as functional knowledge about objects were impaired when the semantic deficit was severe. Semantic and unrelated errors were produced during object use, but actions were always fluent and patients performed normally on a novel tools task in which the semantic demand was minimal. Patients with severe semantic deficits scored borderline on ideational apraxia tasks. Our data indicate that functional semantic knowledge is crucial for using objects in a conventional way and suggest that non-semantic factors, mainly non-declarative components of memory, might compensate to some extent for semantic disorders and guarantee some residual ability to use very common objects independently of semantic knowledge.

  9. Transposed-Letter Priming Effects with Masked Subset Primes: A Re-Examination of the "Relative Position Priming Constraint"

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stinchcombe, Eric J.; Lupker, Stephen J.; Davis, Colin J.

    2012-01-01

    Three experiments are reported investigating the role of letter order in orthographic subset priming (e.g., "grdn"-GARDEN) using both the conventional masked priming technique as well as the sandwich priming technique in a lexical decision task. In all three experiments, subset primes produced priming with the effect being considerably…

  10. The pros and cons of masked priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Forster, K I

    1998-03-01

    Masked priming paradigms offer the promise of tapping automatic, strategy-free lexical processing, as evidenced by the lack of expectancy disconfirmation effects, and proportionality effects in semantic priming experiments. But several recent findings suggest the effects may be prelexical. These findings concern nonword priming effects in lexical decision and naming, the effects of mixed-case presentation on nonword priming, and the dependence of priming on the nature of the distractors in lexical decision, suggesting possible strategy effects. The theory underlying each of these effects is discussed, and alternative explanations are developed that do not preclude a lexical basis for masked priming effects.

  11. Social priming improves cognitive control in elderly adults--evidence from the Simon task.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Daniela Aisenberg

    Full Text Available We examined whether social priming of cognitive states affects the inhibitory process in elderly adults, as aging is related to deficits in inhibitory control. Forty-eight elderly adults and 45 young adults were assigned to three groups and performed a cognitive control task (Simon task, which was followed by 3 different manipulations of social priming (i.e., thinking about an 82 year-old person: 1 negative--characterized by poor cognitive abilities, 2 neutral--characterized by acts irrelevant to cognitive abilities, and 3 positive--excellent cognitive abilities. After the manipulation, the Simon task was performed again. Results showed improvement in cognitive control effects in seniors after the positive manipulation, indicated by a significant decrease in the magnitude of the Simon and interference effects, but not after the neutral and negative manipulations. Furthermore, a healthy pattern of sequential effect (Gratton that was absent before the manipulation in all 3 groups appeared after the positive manipulation. Namely, the Simon effect was only present after congruent but not after incongruent trials for the positive manipulation group. No influence of manipulations was found in young adults. These meaningful results were replicated in a second experiment and suggest a decrease in conflict interference resulting from positive cognitive state priming. Our study provides evidence that an implicit social concept of a positive cognitive condition in old age can affect the control process of the elderly and improve cognitive abilities.

  12. Social priming improves cognitive control in elderly adults--evidence from the Simon task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Aisenberg, Daniela; Cohen, Noga; Pick, Hadas; Tressman, Iris; Rappaport, Michal; Shenberg, Tal; Henik, Avishai

    2015-01-01

    We examined whether social priming of cognitive states affects the inhibitory process in elderly adults, as aging is related to deficits in inhibitory control. Forty-eight elderly adults and 45 young adults were assigned to three groups and performed a cognitive control task (Simon task), which was followed by 3 different manipulations of social priming (i.e., thinking about an 82 year-old person): 1) negative--characterized by poor cognitive abilities, 2) neutral--characterized by acts irrelevant to cognitive abilities, and 3) positive--excellent cognitive abilities. After the manipulation, the Simon task was performed again. Results showed improvement in cognitive control effects in seniors after the positive manipulation, indicated by a significant decrease in the magnitude of the Simon and interference effects, but not after the neutral and negative manipulations. Furthermore, a healthy pattern of sequential effect (Gratton) that was absent before the manipulation in all 3 groups appeared after the positive manipulation. Namely, the Simon effect was only present after congruent but not after incongruent trials for the positive manipulation group. No influence of manipulations was found in young adults. These meaningful results were replicated in a second experiment and suggest a decrease in conflict interference resulting from positive cognitive state priming. Our study provides evidence that an implicit social concept of a positive cognitive condition in old age can affect the control process of the elderly and improve cognitive abilities.

  13. Electrophysiological evidence for the action of a center-surround mechanism on semantic processing in the left hemisphere

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    Diana eDeacon

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available Physiological evidence was sought for a center-surround attentional mechanism (CSM, which has been proposed to assist in the retrieval of weakly activated items from semantic memory. The CSM operates by facilitating strongly related items in the center of the weakly activated area of semantic memory, and inhibiting less strongly related items in its surround. In this study weak activation was created by having subjects acquire the meanings of new words to a recall criterion of only 50%. Subjects who attained this approximate criterion level of performance were subsequently included in a semantic priming task, during which ERPs were recorded. Primes were newly learned rare words, and targets were either synonyms, nonsynonymously related words, or unrelated words. All stimuli were presented to the RVF/LH (right visual field/left hemisphere or the LVF/RH (left visual field/right hemisphere. Under RVF/LH stimulation the newly learned word primes produced facilitation on N400 for synonym targets, and inhibition for related targets. No differences were observed under LVF/RH stimulation. The LH thus, supports a CSM, whereby a synonym in the center of attention focused on the newly learned word is facilitated, whereas a related word in the surround is inhibited. The data are consistent with the view of this laboratory that semantic memory is subserved by a spreading activation system in the LH. Also consistent with our view, there was no evidence of spreading activation in the RH. The findings are discussed in the context of additional recent theories of semantic memory. Finally, the adult right hemisphere may require more learning than the LH in order to demonstrate evidence of meaning acquisition.

  14. Degree of handedness and priming: Further evidence for a distinction between production and identification priming mechanisms.

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    Donna J. LaVoie

    2015-02-01

    Full Text Available The distinction between implicit and explicit forms of memory retrieval is long-standing, and important to the extent it reveals how different neural architecture supports different aspects of memory function. Similarly, distinctions have been made between kinds of repetition priming, a form of implicit memory retrieval. This study focuses on the production-identification priming distinction, which delineates priming tasks involving verification of stimulus features as compared to priming tasks that require use of a cue to guide response retrieval. Studies investigating this dissociation in dementia or similar patient populations indicate that these forms of priming may differ in their neural bases. The current study looks at degree of handedness as a way of investigating inferred neural architecture supporting these two forms of priming. A growing body of research indicates that degree of handedness (consistent, or CH, versus inconsistent, or ICH is associated with greater interhemispheric interaction and functional access to right hemisphere processing in ICH, with superior performance seen in ICH on memory tasks reliant on this processing. Arguments about the theoretical mechanisms underlying identification and production forms of perceptual priming tasks suggest that performance on these tasks will differ as a function of degree of handedness. We tested this question in a group of CH and ICH young adults, who were asked to study lists of words prior to performing a production priming task (word stem completion, a perceptual word identification task, and a word stem cued recall task. While both handedness groups exhibited reliable priming across tasks, word stem completion priming was greater in ICH than CH participants, with identification priming not differing between groups. This dissociation supports the argument that production and identification forms of priming have different underlying neural bases.

  15. Atypical temporal activation pattern and central-right brain compensation during semantic judgment task in children with early left brain damage.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chang, Yi-Tzu; Lin, Shih-Che; Meng, Ling-Fu; Fan, Yang-Teng

    In this study we investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs) during the semantic judgment task (deciding if the two Chinese characters were semantically related or unrelated) to identify the timing of neural activation in children with early left brain damage (ELBD). The results demonstrated that compared with the controls, children with ELBD had (1) competitive accuracy and reaction time in the semantic judgment task, (2) weak operation of the N400, (3) stronger, earlier and later compensational positivities (referred to the enhanced P200, P250, and P600 amplitudes) in the central and right region of the brain to successfully engage in semantic judgment. Our preliminary findings indicate that temporally postlesional reorganization is in accordance with the proposed right-hemispheric organization of speech after early left-sided brain lesion. During semantic processing, the orthography has a greater effect on the children with ELBD, and a later semantic reanalysis (P600) is required due to the less efficient N400 at the former stage for semantic integration. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  16. Bidirectional semantic associations between social power and weight.

    Science.gov (United States)

    He, Xiaoling; Chen, Jun; Li, Jianan

    2018-02-01

    Two experiments were conducted to examine bidirectional semantic associations between power and weight using a priming paradigm. Bidirectionality in the relationship between power and weight was demonstrated, utilising tasks that were identical except that the orders in which the stimuli were presented were reversed. In Experiment 1, an empty scale leaning either leftward or rightward was used as a priming stimulus, and a scale that appeared in equilibrium with a pair of power words was used as a target stimulus. In Experiment 2, a scale with a pair of words that appeared in equilibrium was used as a priming stimulus, and an empty scale leaning either leftward or rightward was used as a target stimulus. We identified interaction effects between power and weight in both experiments. Associations between power and weight provide evidence for both conceptual metaphor views and evolutionary theory. The bidirectionality of metaphorical effects is in line with the strong version of metaphoric structuring. Both language and experiential correlations play important roles in the development of the mapping between power and weight. © 2016 International Union of Psychological Science.

  17. Phonological Priming and Cohort Effects in Toddlers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mani, Nivedita; Plunkett, Kim

    2011-01-01

    Adult word recognition is influenced by prior exposure to phonologically or semantically related words ("cup" primes "cat" or "plate") compared to unrelated words ("door"), suggesting that words are organised in the adult lexicon based on their phonological and semantic properties and that word recognition implicates not just the heard word, but…

  18. Differentiation of perceptual and semantic subsequent memory effects using an orthographic paradigm.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kuo, Michael C C; Liu, Karen P Y; Ting, Kin Hung; Chan, Chetwyn C H

    2012-11-27

    This study aimed to differentiate perceptual and semantic encoding processes using subsequent memory effects (SMEs) elicited by the recognition of orthographs of single Chinese characters. Participants studied a series of Chinese characters perceptually (by inspecting orthographic components) or semantically (by determining the object making sounds), and then made studied or unstudied judgments during the recognition phase. Recognition performance in terms of d-prime measure in the semantic condition was higher, though not significant, than that of the perceptual condition. The between perceptual-semantic condition differences in SMEs at P550 and late positive component latencies (700-1000ms) were not significant in the frontal area. An additional analysis identified larger SME in the semantic condition during 600-1000ms in the frontal pole regions. These results indicate that coordination and incorporation of orthographic information into mental representation is essential to both task conditions. The differentiation was also revealed in earlier SMEs (perceptual>semantic) at N3 (240-360ms) latency, which is a novel finding. The left-distributed N3 was interpreted as more efficient processing of meaning with semantically learned characters. Frontal pole SMEs indicated strategic processing by executive functions, which would further enhance memory. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  19. Functional MRI approach for assessing hemispheric predominance of regions activated by a phonological and a semantic task

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    Cousin, Emilie; Peyrin, Carole; Pichat, Cedric [Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition, UMR CNRS 5105, Universite Pierre Mendes-France, BP 47, 38040 Grenoble Cedex 09 (France); Lamalle, Laurent; Le Bas, Jean-Francois [Unite IRM, IFR1, CHU Grenoble (France); Baciu, Monica [Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition, UMR CNRS 5105, Universite Pierre Mendes-France, BP 47, 38040 Grenoble Cedex 09 (France)], E-mail: mbaciu@upmf-grenoble.fr

    2007-08-15

    This fMRI study performed in healthy subjects aimed at using a statistical approach in order to determine significant functional differences between hemispheres and to assess specialized regions activated during a phonological and during a semantic task. This approach ('flip' method and subsequent statistical analyses of the parameter estimates extracted from regions of interest) allows identifying: (a) hemispheric specialized regions for each language task [semantic (living categorization) and phonological (rhyme detection)] and (b) condition-specific regions with respect to paradigm conditions (task and control). Our results showed that the rhyme-specific task regions were the inferior frontal (sub-region of BA 44, 45) and left inferior parietal (BA 40, 39) lobules. Furthermore, within the inferior parietal lobule, the angular gyrus was specific to target (rhyming) items (related to successfully grapho-phonemic processing). The categorization-specific task regions were the left inferior frontal (sub-region of BA 44, 45) and superior temporal (BA 22) cortices. Furthermore, the superior temporal gyrus was related to non-target (non-living) items (correlated to task difficulty). The relatively new approach used in this study has the advantage of providing: (a) statistical significance of the hemispheric specialized regions for a given language task and (b) supplementary information in terms of paradigm condition-specificity of the activated regions. The results (standard hemispheric specialized regions for a semantic and for a phonological task) obtained in healthy subjects may constitute a basement for mapping language and assessing hemispheric predominance in epileptic patients before surgery and avoiding post-surgical impairments of language.

  20. Functional MRI approach for assessing hemispheric predominance of regions activated by a phonological and a semantic task

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Cousin, Emilie; Peyrin, Carole; Pichat, Cedric; Lamalle, Laurent; Le Bas, Jean-Francois; Baciu, Monica

    2007-01-01

    This fMRI study performed in healthy subjects aimed at using a statistical approach in order to determine significant functional differences between hemispheres and to assess specialized regions activated during a phonological and during a semantic task. This approach ('flip' method and subsequent statistical analyses of the parameter estimates extracted from regions of interest) allows identifying: (a) hemispheric specialized regions for each language task [semantic (living categorization) and phonological (rhyme detection)] and (b) condition-specific regions with respect to paradigm conditions (task and control). Our results showed that the rhyme-specific task regions were the inferior frontal (sub-region of BA 44, 45) and left inferior parietal (BA 40, 39) lobules. Furthermore, within the inferior parietal lobule, the angular gyrus was specific to target (rhyming) items (related to successfully grapho-phonemic processing). The categorization-specific task regions were the left inferior frontal (sub-region of BA 44, 45) and superior temporal (BA 22) cortices. Furthermore, the superior temporal gyrus was related to non-target (non-living) items (correlated to task difficulty). The relatively new approach used in this study has the advantage of providing: (a) statistical significance of the hemispheric specialized regions for a given language task and (b) supplementary information in terms of paradigm condition-specificity of the activated regions. The results (standard hemispheric specialized regions for a semantic and for a phonological task) obtained in healthy subjects may constitute a basement for mapping language and assessing hemispheric predominance in epileptic patients before surgery and avoiding post-surgical impairments of language

  1. Automaticity Revisited: When Print Doesn't Activate Semantics

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    Elsa Magdalena Labuschagne

    2015-02-01

    Full Text Available It is widely accepted that the presentation of a printed word automatically triggers processing that ends with full semantic activation. This processing, among other characteristics, is held to occur without intention, and cannot be stopped. The results of the present experiment show that this account is problematic in the context of a variant of the Stroop paradigm. Subjects named the print color of words that were either neutral or semantically related to color. When the letters were all colored, all spatially cued, and the spaces between letters were filled with characters from the top of the keyboard (i.e., 4, #, 5, %, 6, and *, color naming yielded a semantically based Stroop effect and a semantically based negative priming effect. In contrast, the same items yielded neither a semantic Stroop effect nor a negative priming effect when a single target letter was uniquely colored and spatially cued. These findings undermine the widespread view that lexical-semantic activation in word reading is automatic in the sense that it occurs without intention and cannot be derailed.

  2. Effect of priming cooperation or individualism on a collective and interdependent task: changeover speed in the 4 x 100-meter relay race.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bry, Clémentine; Meyer, Thierry; Oberlé, Dominique; Gherson, Thibault

    2009-06-01

    Priming effects of cooperation vs. individualism were investigated on changeover speed within a 4 x 100-m relay race. Ten teams of four adult beginner athletes ran two relays, a pretest race and an experimental race 3 weeks later. Just before the experimental race, athletes were primed with either cooperation or individualism through a scrambled-sentence task. Comparing to the pretest performance, cooperation priming improved baton speed in the exchange zone (+30 cm/s). Individualism priming did not impair changeover performance. The boundary conditions of priming effects applied to collective and interdependent tasks are discussed within the implicit coordination framework.

  3. Negative priming in a numerical Piaget-like task as evidenced by ERP.

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    Daurignac, Elsa; Houdé, Olivier; Jouvent, Roland

    2006-05-01

    Inhibition is a key executive function in adults and children for the acquisition and expression of cognitive abilities. Using event-related potentials in a priming adaptation of a Piaget-like numerical task taken from developmental psychology, we report a negative priming effect in adults measured just after the cognitive inhibition of a misleading strategy, the visuospatial length-equals-number bias. This effect was determined in the N200 information processing stage through increased N200 amplitude. We show here that for accuracy in numerical quantification, the adult brain still had to control the child-like cognition biases that are stored in a kind of "developmental memory."

  4. The modulatory influence of the functional COMT Val158Met polymorphism on lexical decisions and semantic priming

    OpenAIRE

    Reuter, Martin; Montag, Christian; Peters, Kristina; Kocher, Anne; Kiefer, Markus

    2009-01-01

    The role of the prefrontal Cortex (PFC) in higher cognitive functions - including working memory, conflict resolution, set shifting and semantic processing - has been demonstrated unequivocally. Despite the great heterogeneity among tasks measuring these phenotypes, due in part to the different cognitive sub-processes implied and the specificity of the stimulus material used, there is agreement that all of these tasks recruit an executive control system located in the PFC. On a biochemical le...

  5. The special status of verbal knowledge in semantic memory: evidence from performance of semantically impaired subjects on verbalizable and non-verbalizable versions of the object decision task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zannino, Gian Daniele; Perri, Roberta; Monaco, Marco; Caltagirone, Carlo; Luzzi, Simona; Carlesimo, Giovanni A

    2014-01-01

    According to the semantic hub hypothesis, a supramodal semantic hub is equally needed to deal with verbal and extraverbal "surface" representations. Damage to the supramodal hub is thought to underlie the crossmodal impairment observed in selective semantic deficits. In the present paper, we provide evidence supporting an alternative view: we hold that semantic impairment is not equal across domains but affects verbal behavior disproportionately. We investigated our hypothesis by manipulating the verbal load in an object decision task. Two pathological groups showing different levels of semantic impairment were enrolled together with their normal controls. The severe group included 10 subjects with semantic dementia and the mild group 10 subjects with Alzheimer's disease. In keeping with our hypothesis, when shifting from the low verbal load to the high verbal load condition, brain-damaged individuals, as compared to controls, showed a disproportionate impairment as a function of the severity of their semantic deficit. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  6. A neural signature of food semantics is associated with body-mass index.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pergola, Giulio; Foroni, Francesco; Mengotti, Paola; Argiris, Georgette; Rumiati, Raffaella Ida

    2017-10-01

    Visual recognition of objects may rely on different features depending on the category to which they belong. Recognizing natural objects, such as fruits and plants, weighs more on their perceptual attributes, whereas recognizing man-made objects, such as tools or vehicles, weighs more upon the functions and actions they enable. Edible objects are perceptually rich but also prepared for specific functions, therefore it is unclear how perceptual and functional attributes affect their recognition. Two event-related potentials experiments investigated: (i) whether food categorization in the brain is differentially modulated by sensory and functional attributes, depending on whether the food is natural or transformed; (ii) whether these processes are modulated by participants' body mass index. In experiment 1, healthy normal-weight participants were presented with a sentence (prime) and a photograph of a food. Primes described either a sensory feature ('It tastes sweet') or a functional feature ('It is suitable for a wedding party') of the food, while photographs depicted either a natural (e.g., cherry) or a transformed food (e.g., pizza). Prime-feature pairs were either congruent or incongruent. This design aimed at modulating N400-like components elicited by semantic processing. In experiment 1, N400-like amplitude was significantly larger for transformed food than for natural food with sensory primes, and vice versa with functional primes. In experiment 2, underweight and obese women performed the same semantic task. We found that, while the N400-like component in obese participants was modulated by sensory-functional primes only for transformed food, the same modulation was found in underweight participants only for natural food. These findings suggest that the level of food transformation interacts with participants' body mass index in modulating food perception and the underlying brain processing. Crown Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights

  7. Different Ways to Cue a Coherent Memory System: A Theory for Episodic, Semantic, and Procedural Tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Humphreys, Michael S.; And Others

    1989-01-01

    An associative theory of memory is proposed to serve as a counterexample to claims that dissociations among episodic, semantic, and procedural memory tasks necessitate separate memory systems. The theory is based on task analyses of matching (recognition and familiarity judgments), retrieval (cued recall), and production (free association). (TJH)

  8. Estudo comparativo do acesso semântico no processamento visual de palavras entre brasileiros monolíngues e chineses multilíngues falantes do português do Brasil como língua estrangeira Comparative study of the semantic access in the visual processing of words between monolinguistic Brazilians and multilinguistic Chinese who speak portuguese as a foreign language

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jerusa Fumagalli de Salles

    2010-12-01

    task with stimuli presented in Portuguese. The magnitude of the semantic priming effect was compared to two control groups (Brazilian children and adults. Moreover, this study aimed to investigate the relation between the performance in the lexical decision task and the one in the Portuguese phonological awareness task in the Chinese group. The sample was composed of 40 undergraduate multilingual Chinese, 31 undergraduate Brazilians and 26 third-grade children. Results showed semantic priming effects in all groups, which means that reaction time was smaller when a related prime preceded the target. No significant difference was found regarding the magnitude of the semantic priming effects between Chinese and Brazilian adults. However, such a difference appeared between the Chinese adults and the Brazilian children group. Finally, no correlation was found between lexical decision performance and score at the phonological awareness task. We concluded that Chinese, like both Brazilians groups tested, seem to access the meaning of presented primes.

  9. ERPs, semantic processing and age.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Miyamoto, T; Katayama, J; Koyama, T

    1998-06-01

    ERPs (N400, LPC and CNV) were elicited in two sets of subjects grouped according to age (young vs. elderly) using a word-pair category matching paradigm. Each prime consisted of a Japanese noun (constructed from two to four characters of the Hiragana) followed by one Chinese character (Kanji) as the target, this latter representing one of five semantic categories. There were two equally probable target conditions: match or mismatch. Each target was preceded by a prime, either belonging to, or not belonging to, the same semantic category. The subjects were required to respond with a specified button press to the given target according to the condition. We found RTs to be longer in the elderly subjects and under the mismatch condition. N400 amplitude was reduced in the elderly subjects under the mismatch condition and there was no difference between match and mismatch response, which were similar in amplitude to that under match condition for the young subjects. In addition, the CNV amplitudes were larger in the elderly subjects. These results suggested that functional changes in semantic processing through aging (larger semantic networks and diffuse semantic activation) were the cause of this N400 reduction, attributing a subsidiary role to attentional disturbance. We also discuss the importance of taking age-related changes into consideration in clinical studies.

  10. Semantic congruence enhances memory of episodic associations: role of theta oscillations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Atienza, Mercedes; Crespo-Garcia, Maite; Cantero, Jose L

    2011-01-01

    Growing evidence suggests that theta oscillations play a crucial role in episodic encoding. The present study evaluates whether changes in electroencephalographic theta source dynamics mediate the positive influence of semantic congruence on incidental associative learning. Here we show that memory for episodic associations (face-location) is more accurate when studied under semantically congruent contexts. However, only participants showing RT priming effect in a conceptual priming test (priming group) also gave faster responses when recollecting source information of semantically congruent faces as compared with semantically incongruent faces. This improved episodic retrieval was positively correlated with increases in theta power during the study phase mainly in the bilateral parahippocampal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, and left lateral posterior parietal lobe. Reconstructed signals from the estimated sources showed higher theta power for congruent than incongruent faces and also for the priming than the nonpriming group. These results are in agreement with the attention to memory model. Besides directing top-down attention to goal-relevant semantic information during encoding, the dorsal parietal lobe may also be involved in redirecting attention to bottom-up-driven memories thanks to connections between the medial-temporal and the left ventral parietal lobe. The latter function can either facilitate or interfere with encoding of face-location associations depending on whether they are preceded by semantically congruent or incongruent contexts, respectively, because only in the former condition retrieved representations related to the cue and the face are both coherent with the person identity and are both associated with the same location.

  11. Selective Inhibition and Naming Performance in Semantic Blocking, Picture-Word Interference, and Color-Word Stroop Tasks

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shao, Zeshu; Roelofs, Ardi; Martin, Randi C.; Meyer, Antje S.

    2015-01-01

    In 2 studies, we examined whether explicit distractors are necessary and sufficient to evoke selective inhibition in 3 naming tasks: the semantic blocking, picture-word interference, and color-word Stroop task. Delta plots were used to quantify the size of the interference effects as a function of reaction time (RT). Selective inhibition was…

  12. Performance of Older Persons in a Simulated Shopping Task Is Influenced by Priming with Age Stereotypes.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bock, Otmar; Akpinar, Selçuk

    2016-01-01

    Previous research suggests that older persons show cognitive deficits in standardized laboratory tests, but not in more natural tests such as the Multiple Errands Task (MET). The absence of deficits in the latter tests has been attributed to the compensation of deficits by strategies based on life-long experience. To scrutinize this view, we primed older participants with positive or negative stereotypes about old age before administering MET. We found that compared to unprimed controls, priming with positive age stereotypes reduced the number of errors without changing response times, while priming with negative stereotypes changed neither errors not response times. We interpret our findings as evidence that positive age priming improved participants' cognitive functions while leaving intact their experience-based compensation, and that negative age priming degraded participants' cognitive functions which, however, was balanced by an even stronger experience-based compensation.

  13. Language production in a shared task: Cumulative semantic interference from self- and other-produced context words

    OpenAIRE

    Hoedemaker, R.; Ernst, J.; Meyer, A.; Belke, E.

    2017-01-01

    This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this paradigm, naming latencies have been found to increase for successive presentations of exemplars from the same category, a phenomenon known as Cumulative Semantic Interference (CSI). As expected, th...

  14. Interacting Memory Systems—Does EEG Alpha Activity Respond to Semantic Long-Term Memory Access in a Working Memory Task?

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Barbara Berger

    2014-12-01

    Full Text Available Memory consists of various individual processes which form a dynamic system co-ordinated by central (executive functions. The episodic buffer as direct interface between episodic long-term memory (LTM and working memory (WM is fairly well studied but such direct interaction is less clear in semantic LTM. Here, we designed a verbal delayed-match-to-sample task specifically to differentiate between pure information maintenance and mental manipulation of memory traces with and without involvement of access to semantic LTM. Task-related amplitude differences of electroencephalographic (EEG oscillatory brain activity showed a linear increase in frontal-midline theta and linear suppression of parietal beta amplitudes relative to memory operation complexity. Amplitude suppression at upper alpha frequency, which was previously found to indicate access to semantic LTM, was only sensitive to mental manipulation in general, irrespective of LTM involvement. This suggests that suppression of upper EEG alpha activity might rather reflect unspecific distributed cortical activation during complex mental processes than accessing semantic LTM.

  15. Ways of making-sense: Local gamma synchronization reveals differences between semantic processing induced by music and language.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Barraza, Paulo; Chavez, Mario; Rodríguez, Eugenio

    2016-01-01

    Similar to linguistic stimuli, music can also prime the meaning of a subsequent word. However, it is so far unknown what is the brain dynamics underlying the semantic priming effect induced by music, and its relation to language. To elucidate these issues, we compare the brain oscillatory response to visual words that have been semantically primed either by a musical excerpt or by an auditory sentence. We found that semantic violation between music-word pairs triggers a classical ERP N400, and induces a sustained increase of long-distance theta phase synchrony, along with a transient increase of local gamma activity. Similar results were observed after linguistic semantic violation except for gamma activity, which increased after semantic congruence between sentence-word pairs. Our findings indicate that local gamma activity is a neural marker that signals different ways of semantic processing between music and language, revealing the dynamic and self-organized nature of the semantic processing. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  16. The neural mechanisms of semantic and response conflicts: an fMRI study of practice-related effects in the Stroop task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Zhencai; Lei, Xu; Ding, Cody; Li, Hong; Chen, Antao

    2013-02-01

    Previous studies have demonstrated that there are separate neural mechanisms underlying semantic and response conflicts in the Stroop task. However, the practice effects of these conflicts need to be elucidated and the possible involvements of common neural mechanisms are yet to be established. We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a 4-2 mapping practice-related Stroop task to determine the neural substrates under these conflicts. Results showed that different patterns of brain activations are associated with practice in the attentional networks (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and posterior parietal cortex (PPC)) for both conflicts, response control regions (e.g., inferior frontal junction (IFJ), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)/insula, and pre-supplementary motor areas (pre-SMA)) for semantic conflict, and posterior cortex for response conflict. We also found areas of common activation in the left hemisphere within the attentional networks, for the early practice stage in semantic conflict and the late stage in "pure" response conflict using conjunction analysis. The different practice effects indicate that there are distinct mechanisms underlying these two conflict types: semantic conflict practice effects are attributable to the automation of stimulus processing, conflict and response control; response conflict practice effects are attributable to the proportional increase of conflict-related cognitive resources. In addition, the areas of common activation suggest that the semantic conflict effect may contain a partial response conflict effect, particularly at the beginning of the task. These findings indicate that there are two kinds of response conflicts contained in the key-pressing Stroop task: the vocal-level (mainly in the early stage) and key-pressing (mainly in the late stage) response conflicts; thus, the use of the subtraction method for the exploration of semantic and response conflicts

  17. Recruitment of Anterior and Posterior Structures in Lexical-Semantic Processing: An fMRI Study Comparing Implicit and Explicit Tasks

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ruff, Ilana; Blumstein, Sheila E.; Myers, Emily B.; Hutchison, Emmette

    2008-01-01

    Previous studies examining explicit semantic processing have consistently shown activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). In contrast, implicit semantic processing tasks have shown activation in posterior areas including the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) with less consistent activation in the IFG.…

  18. Combining Temporal and Spectral Information with Spatial Mapping to Identify Differences between Phonological and Semantic Networks: A Magnetoencephalographic Approach.

    Science.gov (United States)

    McNab, Fiona; Hillebrand, Arjan; Swithenby, Stephen J; Rippon, Gina

    2012-01-01

    Early, lesion-based models of language processing suggested that semantic and phonological processes are associated with distinct temporal and parietal regions respectively, with frontal areas more indirectly involved. Contemporary spatial brain mapping techniques have not supported such clear-cut segregation, with strong evidence of activation in left temporal areas by both processes and disputed evidence of involvement of frontal areas in both processes. We suggest that combining spatial information with temporal and spectral data may allow a closer scrutiny of the differential involvement of closely overlapping cortical areas in language processing. Using beamforming techniques to analyze magnetoencephalography data, we localized the neuronal substrates underlying primed responses to nouns requiring either phonological or semantic processing, and examined the associated measures of time and frequency in those areas where activation was common to both tasks. Power changes in the beta (14-30 Hz) and gamma (30-50 Hz) frequency bands were analyzed in pre-selected time windows of 350-550 and 500-700 ms In left temporal regions, both tasks elicited power changes in the same time window (350-550 ms), but with different spectral characteristics, low beta (14-20 Hz) for the phonological task and high beta (20-30 Hz) for the semantic task. In frontal areas (BA10), both tasks elicited power changes in the gamma band (30-50 Hz), but in different time windows, 500-700 ms for the phonological task and 350-550 ms for the semantic task. In the left inferior parietal area (BA40), both tasks elicited changes in the 20-30 Hz beta frequency band but in different time windows, 350-550 ms for the phonological task and 500-700 ms for the semantic task. Our findings suggest that, where spatial measures may indicate overlapping areas of involvement, additional beamforming techniques can demonstrate differential activation in time and frequency domains.

  19. Situated conceptualization and semantic processing: effects of emotional experience and context availability in semantic categorization and naming tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Moffat, Michael; Siakaluk, Paul D; Sidhu, David M; Pexman, Penny M

    2015-04-01

    It has been proposed that much of conceptual knowledge is acquired through situated conceptualization, such that both external (e.g., agents, objects, events) and internal (e.g., emotions, introspections) environments are considered important (Barsalou, 2003). To evaluate this proposal, we characterized two dimensions by which situated conceptualization may be measured and which should have different relevance for abstract and concrete concepts; namely, emotional experience (i.e., the ease with which words evoke emotional experience; Newcombe, Campbell, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2012) and context availability (i.e., the ease with which words evoke contexts in which their referents may appear; Schwanenflugel & Shoben, 1983). We examined the effects of these two dimensions on abstract and concrete word processing in verbal semantic categorization (VSCT) and naming tasks. In the VSCT, emotional experience facilitated processing of abstract words but inhibited processing of concrete words, whereas context availability facilitated processing of both types of words. In the naming task in which abstract words and concrete words were not blocked by emotional experience, context availability facilitated responding to only the abstract words. In the naming task in which abstract words and concrete words were blocked by emotional experience, emotional experience facilitated responding to only the abstract words, whereas context availability facilitated responding to only the concrete words. These results were observed even with several lexical (e.g., frequency, age of acquisition) and semantic (e.g., concreteness, arousal, valence) variables included in the analyses. As such, the present research suggests that emotional experience and context availability tap into different aspects of situated conceptualization and make unique contributions to the representation and processing of abstract and concrete concepts.

  20. Semantic interference in picture naming during dual-task performance does not vary with reading ability

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Piai, V.; Roelofs, A.P.A.; Roete, I.E.C.

    2015-01-01

    Previous dual-task studies examining the locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming have obtained diverging results. In these studies, participants manually responded to tones and named pictures while ignoring distractor words (picture-word interference, PWI) with varying

  1. Memory systems, processes, and tasks: taxonomic clarification via factor analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bruss, Peter J; Mitchell, David B

    2009-01-01

    The nature of various memory systems was examined using factor analysis. We reanalyzed data from 11 memory tasks previously reported in Mitchell and Bruss (2003). Four well-defined factors emerged, closely resembling episodic and semantic memory and conceptual and perceptual implicit memory, in line with both memory systems and transfer-appropriate processing accounts. To explore taxonomic issues, we ran separate analyses on the implicit tasks. Using a cross-format manipulation (pictures vs. words), we identified 3 prototypical tasks. Word fragment completion and picture fragment identification tasks were "factor pure," tapping perceptual processes uniquely. Category exemplar generation revealed its conceptual nature, yielding both cross-format priming and a picture superiority effect. In contrast, word stem completion and picture naming were more complex, revealing attributes of both processes.

  2. The priming of priming: Evidence that the N400 reflects context-dependent post-retrieval word integration in working memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Steinhauer, Karsten; Royle, Phaedra; Drury, John E; Fromont, Lauren A

    2017-06-09

    Which cognitive processes are reflected by the N400 in ERPs is still controversial. Various recent articles (Lau et al., 2008; Brouwer et al., 2012) have revived the idea that only lexical pre-activation processes (such as automatic spreading activation, ASA) are strongly supported, while post-lexical integrative processes are not. Challenging this view, the present ERP study replicates a behavioral study by McKoon and Ratcliff (1995) who demonstrated that a prime-target pair such as finger - hand shows stronger priming when a majority of other pairs in the list share the analogous semantic relationship (here: part-whole), even at short stimulus onset asynchronies (250ms). We created lists with four different types of semantic relationship (synonyms, part-whole, category-member, and opposites) and compared priming for pairs in a consistent list with those in an inconsistent list as well as unrelated items. Highly significant N400 reductions were found for both relatedness priming (unrelated vs. inconsistent) and relational priming (inconsistent vs. consistent). These data are taken as strong evidence that N400 priming effects are not exclusively carried by ASA-like mechanisms during lexical retrieval but also include post-lexical integration in working memory. We link the present findings to a neurocomputational model for relational reasoning (Knowlton et al., 2012) and to recent discussions of context-dependent conceptual activations (Yee and Thompson-Schill, 2016). Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  3. Masked immediate-repetition-priming effect on the early lexical process in the bilateral anterior temporal areas assessed by neuromagnetic responses.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fujimaki, Norio; Hayakawa, Tomoe; Ihara, Aya; Matani, Ayumu; Wei, Qiang; Terazono, Yasushi; Murata, Tsutomu

    2010-10-01

    A masked priming paradigm has been used to measure unconscious and automatic context effects on the processing of words. However, its spatiotemporal neural basis has not yet been clarified. To test the hypothesis that masked repetition priming causes enhancement of neural activation, we conducted a magnetoencephalography experiment in which a prime was visually presented for a short duration (50 ms), preceded by a mask pattern, and followed by a target word that was represented by a Japanese katakana syllabogram. The prime, which was identical to the target, was represented by another hiragana syllabogram in the "Repeated" condition, whereas it was a string of unreadable pseudocharacters in the "Unrepeated" condition. Subjects executed a categorical decision task on the target. Activation was significantly larger for the Repeated condition than for the Unrepeated condition at a time window of 150-250 ms in the right occipital area, 200-250 ms in the bilateral ventral occipitotemporal areas, and 200-250 ms and 200-300 ms in the left and right anterior temporal areas, respectively. These areas have been reported to be related to processing of visual-form/orthography and lexico-semantics, and the enhanced activation supports the hypothesis. However, the absence of the priming effect in the areas related to phonological processing implies that automatic phonological priming effect depends on task requirements. 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd and the Japan Neuroscience Society. All rights reserved.

  4. Semantic Neighborhood Effects for Abstract versus Concrete Words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Danguecan, Ashley N; Buchanan, Lori

    2016-01-01

    Studies show that semantic effects may be task-specific, and thus, that semantic representations are flexible and dynamic. Such findings are critical to the development of a comprehensive theory of semantic processing in visual word recognition, which should arguably account for how semantic effects may vary by task. It has been suggested that semantic effects are more directly examined using tasks that explicitly require meaning processing relative to those for which meaning processing is not necessary (e.g., lexical decision task). The purpose of the present study was to chart the processing of concrete versus abstract words in the context of a global co-occurrence variable, semantic neighborhood density (SND), by comparing word recognition response times (RTs) across four tasks varying in explicit semantic demands: standard lexical decision task (with non-pronounceable non-words), go/no-go lexical decision task (with pronounceable non-words), progressive demasking task, and sentence relatedness task. The same experimental stimulus set was used across experiments and consisted of 44 concrete and 44 abstract words, with half of these being low SND, and half being high SND. In this way, concreteness and SND were manipulated in a factorial design using a number of visual word recognition tasks. A consistent RT pattern emerged across tasks, in which SND effects were found for abstract (but not necessarily concrete) words. Ultimately, these findings highlight the importance of studying interactive effects in word recognition, and suggest that linguistic associative information is particularly important for abstract words.

  5. The Role of Executive Function in the Semantic Comprehension Deficits of Stroke Aphasia and Semantic Dementia

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Curtiss Chapman

    2015-05-01

    Results from 5 SD patients and 4 SA patients in our ongoing study suggest similar patterns of impairment on both semantic and executive function tasks for both patient groups. Both showed multi-modal semantic deficits via poor performance on at least 3 out of 5 semantic tasks tapping different modalities. Also, SA and SD patients showed no difference in consistency across semantic tasks (see Fig. 1a & b. Both groups also showed consistently poor performance on trail-making and verbal Stroop tasks compared to controls (see Figs. 1c & 1d. SD patients seem to be less impaired on both span measures (word span range: 2.17 – 4.43; digit span: 3.17 – 5.5 than SA patients (word span range: 1.63 – 3.75; digit span: 1.17 – 4.17, and performance was variable for both groups on non-verbal Stroop and picture-word interference. SD patients found many executive tasks too difficult to understand, which may be the reason for limited prior data for them on EF tasks.. These findings suggest that the use of syndrome categories like semantic dementia and comprehension-impaired stroke aphasia are not useful in distinguishing between storage and access deficits. Patients classified as having SD seem as likely as SA patients to have certain kinds of executive deficits and SA patients may be as likely as SD patients to show consistency across semantic tasks. The results imply that some other behavioral or neuroanatomical basis rather than syndrome classification should be used to address the hypothesized separation of storage vs. control aspects of semantic memory.

  6. Priming in concert: Assimilation and contrast with multiple affective and gender primes.

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Fockenberg, D.A.; Koole, S.L.; Semin, G.R.

    2008-01-01

    The present research investigated the influence of multiple sequential primes on social categorization processes. Study 1 examined an evaluative decision task in which targets were preceded and succeeded by two primes. As expected, the temporally closest forward primes had assimilative effects on

  7. Color perception involves color representations firstly at a semantic level and then at a lexical level.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Heurley, Loïc P; Brouillet, Thibaut; Chesnoy, Gabrielle; Brouillet, Denis

    2013-03-01

    Studies and models have suggested that color perception first involves access to semantic representations of color. This result leads to two questions: (1) is knowledge able to influence the perception of color when associated with a color? and (2) can the perception of color really involve only semantic representations? We developed an experiment where participants have to discriminate the color of a patch (yellow vs. green). The target patch is preceded either by a black-and-white line drawing or by a word representing a natural object associated with the same or a different color (banana vs. frog). We expected a priming effect for pictures because, with a 350-ms SOA, they only involve access to semantic representations of color, whereas words seem only elicit an access to lexical representations. As expected, we found a priming effect for pictures, but also for words. Moreover, we found a general slowdown of response times in the word-prime-condition suggesting the need of an additional processing step to produce priming. In a second experiment, we manipulated the SOA in order to preclude a semantic access in the word-prime-condition that could explain the additional step of processing. We also found a priming effect, suggesting that interaction with perception occurs at a lexical level and the additional step occurs at a color perception level. In the discussion, we develop a new model of color perception assuming that color perception involves access to semantic representations and then access to lexical representations.

  8. Aging affects both perceptual and lexical/semantic components of word stem priming: An event-related fMRI study

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Daselaar, S.M.; Veltman, D.J.; Rombouts, S.A.R.B.; Raaijmakers, J.G.; Jonker, C.

    2005-01-01

    In this event-related fMRI study, brain activity patterns were compared in extensive groups of young (N = 25) and older (N = 38) adults, while they were performing a word stem completion priming task. Based on behavioral findings, we tested the hypothesis that aging affects only the

  9. Food words distract the hungry: Evidence of involuntary semantic processing of task-irrelevant but biologically-relevant unexpected auditory words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Parmentier, Fabrice B R; Pacheco-Unguetti, Antonia P; Valero, Sara

    2018-01-01

    Rare changes in a stream of otherwise repeated task-irrelevant sounds break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task by triggering shifts of attention to and from the deviant sound (deviance distraction). Evidence indicates that the involuntary orientation of attention to unexpected sounds is followed by their semantic processing. However, past demonstrations relied on tasks in which the meaning of the deviant sounds overlapped with features of the primary task. Here we examine whether such processing is observed when no such overlap is present but sounds carry some relevance to the participants' biological need to eat when hungry. We report the results of an experiment in which hungry and satiated participants partook in a cross-modal oddball task in which they categorized visual digits (odd/even) while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds. On most trials the irrelevant sound was a sinewave tone (standard sound). On the remaining trials, deviant sounds consisted of spoken words related to food (food deviants) or control words (control deviants). Questionnaire data confirmed state (but not trait) differences between the two groups with respect to food craving, as well as a greater desire to eat the food corresponding to the food-related words in the hungry relative to the satiated participants. The results of the oddball task revealed that food deviants produced greater distraction (longer response times) than control deviants in hungry participants while the reverse effect was observed in satiated participants. This effect was observed in the first block of trials but disappeared thereafter, reflecting semantic saturation. Our results suggest that (1) the semantic content of deviant sounds is involuntarily processed even when sharing no feature with the primary task; and that (2) distraction by deviant sounds can be modulated by the participants' biological needs.

  10. Lexical-Semantic Search Under Different Covert Verbal Fluency Tasks: An fMRI Study

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yunqing Li

    2017-08-01

    Full Text Available Background: Verbal fluency is a measure of cognitive flexibility and word search strategies that is widely used to characterize impaired cognitive function. Despite the wealth of research on identifying and characterizing distinct aspects of verbal fluency, the anatomic and functional substrates of retrieval-related search and post-retrieval control processes still have not been fully elucidated.Methods: Twenty-one native English-speaking, healthy, right-handed, adult volunteers (mean age = 31 years; range = 21–45 years; 9 F took part in a block-design functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI study of free recall, covert word generation tasks when guided by phonemic (P, semantic-category (C, and context-based fill-in–the-blank sentence completion (S cues. General linear model (GLM, Independent Component Analysis (ICA, and psychophysiological interaction (PPI were used to further characterize the neural substrate of verbal fluency as a function of retrieval cue type.Results: Common localized activations across P, C, and S tasks occurred in the bilateral superior and left inferior frontal gyrus, left anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral supplementary motor area (SMA, and left insula. Differential task activations were centered in the occipital, temporal and parietal regions as well as the thalamus and cerebellum. The context-based fluency task, i.e., the S task, elicited higher differential brain activity in a lateralized frontal-temporal network typically engaged in complex language processing. P and C tasks elicited activation in limited pathways mainly within the left frontal regions. ICA and PPI results of the S task suggested that brain regions distributed across both hemispheres, extending beyond classical language areas, are recruited for lexical-semantic access and retrieval during sentence completion.Conclusion: Study results support the hypothesis of overlapping, as well as distinct, neural networks for covert word generation when

  11. Flexible establishment of functional brain networks supports attentional modulation of unconscious cognition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ulrich, Martin; Adams, Sarah C; Kiefer, Markus

    2014-11-01

    In classical theories of attention, unconscious automatic processes are thought to be independent of higher-level attentional influences. Here, we propose that unconscious processing depends on attentional enhancement of task-congruent processing pathways implemented by a dynamic modulation of the functional communication between brain regions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested our model with a subliminally primed lexical decision task preceded by an induction task preparing either a semantic or a perceptual task set. Subliminal semantic priming was significantly greater after semantic compared to perceptual induction in ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) and inferior frontal cortex, brain areas known to be involved in semantic processing. The functional connectivity pattern of vOT varied depending on the induction task and successfully predicted the magnitude of behavioral and neural priming. Together, these findings support the proposal that dynamic establishment of functional networks by task sets is an important mechanism in the attentional control of unconscious processing. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

  12. CASL The Common Algebraic Specification Language Semantics

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Haxthausen, Anne

    1998-01-01

    This is version 1.0 of the CASL Language Summary, annotated by the CoFI Semantics Task Group with the semantics of constructs. This is the first complete but possibly imperfect version of the semantics. It was compiled prior to the CoFI workshop at Cachan in November 1998.......This is version 1.0 of the CASL Language Summary, annotated by the CoFI Semantics Task Group with the semantics of constructs. This is the first complete but possibly imperfect version of the semantics. It was compiled prior to the CoFI workshop at Cachan in November 1998....

  13. L2-L1 Translation Priming Effects in a Lexical Decision Task: Evidence From Low Proficient Korean-English Bilinguals

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yoonhyoung Lee

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available One of the key issues in bilingual lexical representation is whether L1 processing is facilitated by L2 words. In this study, we conducted two experiments using the masked priming paradigm to examine how L2-L1 translation priming effects emerge when unbalanced, low proficiency, Korean-English bilinguals performed a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, we used a 150 ms SOA (50 ms prime duration followed by a blank interval of 100 ms and found a significant L2-L1 translation priming effect. In contrast, in Experiment 2, we used a 60 ms SOA (50 ms prime duration followed by a blank interval of 10 ms and found a null effect of L2-L1 translation priming. This finding is the first demonstration of a significant L2-L1 translation priming effect with unbalanced Korean-English bilinguals. Implications of this work are discussed with regard to bilingual word recognition models.

  14. Impairments in multisensory processing are not universal to the autism spectrum: no evidence for crossmodal priming deficits in Asperger syndrome.

    Science.gov (United States)

    David, Nicole; R Schneider, Till; Vogeley, Kai; Engel, Andreas K

    2011-10-01

    Individuals suffering from autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often show a tendency for detail- or feature-based perception (also referred to as "local processing bias") instead of more holistic stimulus processing typical for unaffected people. This local processing bias has been demonstrated for the visual and auditory domains and there is evidence that multisensory processing may also be affected in ASD. Most multisensory processing paradigms used social-communicative stimuli, such as human speech or faces, probing the processing of simultaneously occuring sensory signals. Multisensory processing, however, is not limited to simultaneous stimulation. In this study, we investigated whether multisensory processing deficits in ASD persist when semantically complex but nonsocial stimuli are presented in succession. Fifteen adult individuals with Asperger syndrome and 15 control persons participated in a visual-audio priming task, which required the classification of sounds that were either primed by semantically congruent or incongruent preceding pictures of objects. As expected, performance on congruent trials was faster and more accurate compared with incongruent trials (crossmodal priming effect). The Asperger group, however, did not differ significantly from the control group. Our results do not support a general multisensory processing deficit, which is universal to the entire autism spectrum. Copyright © 2011, International Society for Autism Research, Wiley-Liss, Inc.

  15. Midfrontal Theta and Posterior Parietal Alpha Band Oscillations Support Conflict Resolution in a Masked Affective Priming Task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jiang, Jun; Bailey, Kira; Xiao, Xiao

    2018-01-01

    Past attempts to characterize the neural mechanisms of affective priming have conceptualized it in terms of classic cognitive conflict, but have not examined the neural oscillatory mechanisms of subliminal affective priming. Using behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG) time frequency (TF) analysis, the current study examines the oscillatory dynamics of unconsciously triggered conflict in an emotional facial expressions version of the masked affective priming task. The results demonstrate that the power dynamics of conflict are characterized by increased midfrontal theta activity and suppressed parieto-occipital alpha activity. Across-subject and within-trial correlation analyses further confirmed this pattern. Phase synchrony and Granger causality analyses (GCAs) revealed that the fronto-parietal network was involved in unconscious conflict detection and resolution. Our findings support a response conflict account of affective priming, and reveal the role of the fronto-parietal network in unconscious conflict control.

  16. Midfrontal Theta and Posterior Parietal Alpha Band Oscillations Support Conflict Resolution in a Masked Affective Priming Task

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jun Jiang

    2018-05-01

    Full Text Available Past attempts to characterize the neural mechanisms of affective priming have conceptualized it in terms of classic cognitive conflict, but have not examined the neural oscillatory mechanisms of subliminal affective priming. Using behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG time frequency (TF analysis, the current study examines the oscillatory dynamics of unconsciously triggered conflict in an emotional facial expressions version of the masked affective priming task. The results demonstrate that the power dynamics of conflict are characterized by increased midfrontal theta activity and suppressed parieto-occipital alpha activity. Across-subject and within-trial correlation analyses further confirmed this pattern. Phase synchrony and Granger causality analyses (GCAs revealed that the fronto-parietal network was involved in unconscious conflict detection and resolution. Our findings support a response conflict account of affective priming, and reveal the role of the fronto-parietal network in unconscious conflict control.

  17. Flexible recruitment of semantic richness: Context modulates body-object interaction effects in lexical-semantic processing

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Cody eTousignant

    2012-03-01

    Full Text Available Body-object interaction (BOI is a semantic richness variable that measures the perceived ease with which the human body can physically interact with a word’s referent. Lexical and semantic processing is facilitated when words are associated with relatively more bodily experience (high BOI words, e.g., belt. To date, BOI effects have been examined in only one semantic decision context (is it imageable?. It has been argued that semantic processing is dynamic and can be modulated by context. We examined these influences by testing how task knowledge modulated BOI effects. We presented the same stimuli (high- and low-BOI entity words and a set of action words in each of four action/entity semantic categorization tasks (SCTs. Task framing was manipulated: participants were told about one (actions or entities or both (actions and entities categories of words in the decision task. Facilitatory BOI effects were observed when participants knew that ‘entity’ was part of the decision category, regardless of whether the high- and low-BOI entity words appeared on the affirmative or negative side of the decision. That BOI information was only useful when participants had expectations that object words would be presented suggests a strong role for the decision context in lexical-semantic processing, and supports a dynamic view of conceptual knowledge.

  18. The surplus value of semantic annotations

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Marx, M.

    2010-01-01

    We compare the costs of semantic annotation of textual documents to its benefits for information processing tasks. Semantic annotation can improve the performance of retrieval tasks and facilitates an improved search experience through faceted search, focused retrieval, better document summaries,

  19. Affective priming effects of musical sounds on the processing of word meaning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Steinbeis, Nikolaus; Koelsch, Stefan

    2011-03-01

    Recent studies have shown that music is capable of conveying semantically meaningful concepts. Several questions have subsequently arisen particularly with regard to the precise mechanisms underlying the communication of musical meaning as well as the role of specific musical features. The present article reports three studies investigating the role of affect expressed by various musical features in priming subsequent word processing at the semantic level. By means of an affective priming paradigm, it was shown that both musically trained and untrained participants evaluated emotional words congruous to the affect expressed by a preceding chord faster than words incongruous to the preceding chord. This behavioral effect was accompanied by an N400, an ERP typically linked with semantic processing, which was specifically modulated by the (mis)match between the prime and the target. This finding was shown for the musical parameter of consonance/dissonance (Experiment 1) and then extended to mode (major/minor) (Experiment 2) and timbre (Experiment 3). Seeing that the N400 is taken to reflect the processing of meaning, the present findings suggest that the emotional expression of single musical features is understood by listeners as such and is probably processed on a level akin to other affective communications (i.e., prosody or vocalizations) because it interferes with subsequent semantic processing. There were no group differences, suggesting that musical expertise does not have an influence on the processing of emotional expression in music and its semantic connotations.

  20. Syntactic priming in American Sign Language.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hall, Matthew L; Ferreira, Victor S; Mayberry, Rachel I

    2015-01-01

    Psycholinguistic studies of sign language processing provide valuable opportunities to assess whether language phenomena, which are primarily studied in spoken language, are fundamentally shaped by peripheral biology. For example, we know that when given a choice between two syntactically permissible ways to express the same proposition, speakers tend to choose structures that were recently used, a phenomenon known as syntactic priming. Here, we report two experiments testing syntactic priming of a noun phrase construction in American Sign Language (ASL). Experiment 1 shows that second language (L2) signers with normal hearing exhibit syntactic priming in ASL and that priming is stronger when the head noun is repeated between prime and target (the lexical boost effect). Experiment 2 shows that syntactic priming is equally strong among deaf native L1 signers, deaf late L1 learners, and hearing L2 signers. Experiment 2 also tested for, but did not find evidence of, phonological or semantic boosts to syntactic priming in ASL. These results show that despite the profound differences between spoken and signed languages in terms of how they are produced and perceived, the psychological representation of sentence structure (as assessed by syntactic priming) operates similarly in sign and speech.

  1. Morphological Cues for Lexical Semantics

    National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

    Light, Marc

    1996-01-01

    Most natural language processing tasks require lexical semantic information such as verbal argument structure and selectional restrictions, corresponding nominal semantic class, verbal aspectual class...

  2. Sequential Stereotype Priming: A Meta-Analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kidder, Ciara K; White, Katherine R; Hinojos, Michelle R; Sandoval, Mayra; Crites, Stephen L

    2017-08-01

    Psychological interest in stereotype measurement has spanned nearly a century, with researchers adopting implicit measures in the 1980s to complement explicit measures. One of the most frequently used implicit measures of stereotypes is the sequential priming paradigm. The current meta-analysis examines stereotype priming, focusing specifically on this paradigm. To contribute to ongoing discussions regarding methodological rigor in social psychology, one primary goal was to identify methodological moderators of the stereotype priming effect-whether priming is due to a relation between the prime and target stimuli, the prime and target response, participant task, stereotype dimension, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and stimuli type. Data from 39 studies yielded 87 individual effect sizes from 5,497 participants. Analyses revealed that stereotype priming is significantly moderated by the presence of prime-response relations, participant task, stereotype dimension, target stimulus type, SOA, and prime repetition. These results carry both practical and theoretical implications for future research on stereotype priming.

  3. Priming effects in Chinese character recognition for Chinese children with developmental dyslexia

    Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

    Yuliang Zou; Jing Wang; Hanrong Wu

    2009-01-01

    BACKGROUND:Dyslexic children exhibit reading ability unmatched to age,although they possess normal intelligence and are well educated.OBJECTIVE:To examine the performance of dyslexic children in Chinese characters visual recognition tasks and to investigate the relationship between priming effect in character recognition and dyslexia.DESIGN,TIME AND SETTING:A case-control study was performed at the Department of Children and Adolescent Health and Maternal Care,School of Public Health,Tongji Medical College,Huazhong University of Science and Technology between March and June 2007.PARTICIPANTS:A total of 75 primary school students in grades 3 and 5 were selected from two primary schools in Wuhan City,Hubei province,China,and were assigned to three groups.(1) Reading disability (RD,n=25);(2) chronological age (CA) group (n=25 normal readers that were intelligence quotient and age-matched to the RD group);(3) reading level (RL) group (n=25 normal readers that were intelligence quotient and RL-matched to the RD group).All children were right-handed and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.METHODS:Recognition of target characters was performed in each child using a masked prime paradigm.Recognition speed and accuracy of graphic,phonological,and semantic characters were examined.Simultaneously,data,with respect to response time for each target character and error rate,were recorded to calculate facilitation values (unrelated RT-related RT).MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:Response time,facilitation,and error rate in Chinese character recognition task were calculated.RESULTS:The baseline-adjusted facilitation of graphic,phonological,and semantic priming for dyslexic children was -0.010,-0.010,and 0.001,respectively.Dyslexic children displayed inhibition in graphic and phonological prime conditions.Facilitations under the three prime conditions were 0.026,0.026,and 0.022 for the CA group.In the RL group,results were 0.062,0.058,and 0.031 respectively.The differences of baseline

  4. Language production in a shared task: Cumulative semantic interference from self- and other-produced context words

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Hoedemaker, R.S.; Ernst, J.; Meyer, A.S.; Belke, E.

    2017-01-01

    This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this

  5. A New Semantic List Learning Task to Probe Functioning of the Papez Circuit

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schallmo, Michael-Paul; Kassel, Michelle T.; Weisenbach, Sara L.; Walker, Sara J.; Guidotti-Breting, Leslie M.; Rao, Julia A.; Hazlett, Kathleen E.; Considine, Ciaran M.; Sethi, Gurpriya; Vats, Naalti; Pecina, Marta; Welsh, Robert C.; Starkman, Monica N.; Giordani, Bruno; Langenecker, Scott A.

    2016-01-01

    Introduction List learning tasks are powerful clinical tools for studying memory, yet have been relatively underutilized within the functional imaging literature. This limits understanding of regions such as the Papez circuit which support memory performance in healthy, non-demented adults. Method The current study characterized list learning performance in 40 adults who completed a Semantic List Learning Task (SLLT) with a Brown-Peterson manipulation during functional MRI (fMRI). Cued recall with semantic cues, and recognition memory were assessed after imaging. Internal reliability and convergent and discriminant validity were evaluated. Results Subjects averaged 38% accuracy in recall (62% for recognition), with primacy but no recency effects observed. Validity and reliability were demonstrated by showing that the SLLT was correlated with the California Verbal Learning test (CVLT), but not with executive functioning tests, and high intraclass correlation coefficient across lists for recall (.91). fMRI measurements during Encoding (vs. Silent Rehearsal) revealed significant activation in bilateral hippocampus, parahippocampus, and bilateral anterior and posterior cingulate cortex. Post-hoc analyses showed increased activation in anterior and middle hippocampus, subgenual cingulate, and mammillary bodies specific to Encoding. In addition, increasing age was positively associated with increased activation in a diffuse network, particularly frontal cortex and specific Papez regions for correctly recalled words. Gender differences were specific to left inferior and superior frontal cortex. Conclusions This is a clinically relevant list learning task that can be used in studies of groups for which the Papez circuit is damaged or disrupted, in mixed or crossover studies at imaging and clinical sites. PMID:26313512

  6. Transposed-letter priming of prelexical orthographic representations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kinoshita, Sachiko; Norris, Dennis

    2009-01-01

    A prime generated by transposing two internal letters (e.g., jugde) produces strong priming of the original word (judge). In lexical decision, this transposed-letter (TL) priming effect is generally weak or absent for nonword targets; thus, it is unclear whether the origin of this effect is lexical or prelexical. The authors describe the Bayesian Reader theory of masked priming (D. Norris & S. Kinoshita, 2008), which explains why nonwords do not show priming in lexical decision but why they do in the cross-case same-different task. This analysis is followed by 3 experiments that show that priming in this task is not based on low-level perceptual similarity between the prime and target, or on phonology, to make the case that priming is based on prelexical orthographic representation. The authors then use this task to demonstrate equivalent TL priming effects for nonwords and words. The results are interpreted as the first reliable evidence based on the masked priming procedure that letter position is not coded absolutely within the prelexical, orthographic representation. The implications of the results for current letter position coding schemes are discussed.

  7. The effects of divided attention on auditory priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mulligan, Neil W; Duke, Marquinn; Cooper, Angela W

    2007-09-01

    Traditional theorizing stresses the importance of attentional state during encoding for later memory, based primarily on research with explicit memory. Recent research has begun to investigate the role of attention in implicit memory but has focused almost exclusively on priming in the visual modality. The present experiments examined the effect of divided attention on auditory implicit memory, using auditory perceptual identification, word-stem completion and word-fragment completion. Participants heard study words under full attention conditions or while simultaneously carrying out a distractor task (the divided attention condition). In Experiment 1, a distractor task with low response frequency failed to disrupt later auditory priming (but diminished explicit memory as assessed with auditory recognition). In Experiment 2, a distractor task with greater response frequency disrupted priming on all three of the auditory priming tasks as well as the explicit test. These results imply that although auditory priming is less reliant on attention than explicit memory, it is still greatly affected by at least some divided-attention manipulations. These results are consistent with research using visual priming tasks and have relevance for hypotheses regarding attention and auditory priming.

  8. The frequency attenuation effect in identity and associative priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nievas, Francisco

    2010-05-01

    Three lexical decision experiments were carried out, where the masked priming paradigm is used to study the role of the frequency attenuation effect (more priming in low-frequency target words than in high-frequency target words) in repetition and associative priming, manipulating Prime Duration (PD) and Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA). A new concept was introduced, Minimum Time Threshold (MTT), this is, the minimum time interval of exposure to the masked word in order to become aware of it. Results support the notion that MTT is a key to the appearance of the frequency attenuation effect when enough word processing time is allowed. Results do not support the unified explanation of masked priming and long-term priming as proposed by Bodner and Masson (2001). Moreover, information feedback from the semantic level was not the reason for the frequency attenuation effect in repetition priming.

  9. It matters how much you talk: on the automaticity of affective connotations of first and second language words

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Degner, J.; Doycheva, C.; Wentura, D.

    2012-01-01

    We report the results of an affective priming study conducted with proficient sequential German and French bilinguals to assess automatic affective word processing in L1 and L2. Additionally, a semantic priming task was conducted in both languages. Whereas semantic priming effects occurred in L1 and

  10. CASL - The CoFI Algebraic Specification Language - Semantics

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Haxthausen, Anne

    1999-01-01

    This is version 1.0 of the CASL Language Summary, annotated by the CoFI Semantics Task Group with the semantics of constructs. This is the second complete but possibly imperfect version of the semantics. It was compiled prior to the CoFI workshop in Amsterdam in March 1999.......This is version 1.0 of the CASL Language Summary, annotated by the CoFI Semantics Task Group with the semantics of constructs. This is the second complete but possibly imperfect version of the semantics. It was compiled prior to the CoFI workshop in Amsterdam in March 1999....

  11. The contribution of executive control to semantic cognition: Convergent evidence from semantic aphasia and executive dysfunction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Thompson, Hannah E; Almaghyuli, Azizah; Noonan, Krist A; Barak, Ohr; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A; Jefferies, Elizabeth

    2018-01-03

    Semantic cognition, as described by the controlled semantic cognition (CSC) framework (Rogers et al., , Neuropsychologia, 76, 220), involves two key components: activation of coherent, generalizable concepts within a heteromodal 'hub' in combination with modality-specific features (spokes), and a constraining mechanism that manipulates and gates this knowledge to generate time- and task-appropriate behaviour. Executive-semantic goal representations, largely supported by executive regions such as frontal and parietal cortex, are thought to allow the generation of non-dominant aspects of knowledge when these are appropriate for the task or context. Semantic aphasia (SA) patients have executive-semantic deficits, and these are correlated with general executive impairment. If the CSC proposal is correct, patients with executive impairment should not only exhibit impaired semantic cognition, but should also show characteristics that align with those observed in SA. This possibility remains largely untested, as patients selected on the basis that they show executive impairment (i.e., with 'dysexecutive syndrome') have not been extensively tested on tasks tapping semantic control and have not been previously compared with SA cases. We explored conceptual processing in 12 patients showing symptoms consistent with dysexecutive syndrome (DYS) and 24 SA patients, using a range of multimodal semantic assessments which manipulated control demands. Patients with executive impairments, despite not being selected to show semantic impairments, nevertheless showed parallel patterns to SA cases. They showed strong effects of distractor strength, cues and miscues, and probe-target distance, plus minimal effects of word frequency on comprehension (unlike semantic dementia patients with degradation of conceptual knowledge). This supports a component process account of semantic cognition in which retrieval is shaped by control processes, and confirms that deficits in SA patients reflect

  12. Between- and within-Ear Congruency and Laterality Effects in an Auditory Semantic/Emotional Prosody Conflict Task

    Science.gov (United States)

    Techentin, Cheryl; Voyer, Daniel; Klein, Raymond M.

    2009-01-01

    The present study investigated the influence of within- and between-ear congruency on interference and laterality effects in an auditory semantic/prosodic conflict task. Participants were presented dichotically with words (e.g., mad, sad, glad) pronounced in either congruent or incongruent emotional tones (e.g., angry, happy, or sad) and…

  13. Musical and verbal semantic memory: two distinct neural networks?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Groussard, M; Viader, F; Hubert, V; Landeau, B; Abbas, A; Desgranges, B; Eustache, F; Platel, H

    2010-02-01

    Semantic memory has been investigated in numerous neuroimaging and clinical studies, most of which have used verbal or visual, but only very seldom, musical material. Clinical studies have suggested that there is a relative neural independence between verbal and musical semantic memory. In the present study, "musical semantic memory" is defined as memory for "well-known" melodies without any knowledge of the spatial or temporal circumstances of learning, while "verbal semantic memory" corresponds to general knowledge about concepts, again without any knowledge of the spatial or temporal circumstances of learning. Our aim was to compare the neural substrates of musical and verbal semantic memory by administering the same type of task in each modality. We used high-resolution PET H(2)O(15) to observe 11 young subjects performing two main tasks: (1) a musical semantic memory task, where the subjects heard the first part of familiar melodies and had to decide whether the second part they heard matched the first, and (2) a verbal semantic memory task with the same design, but where the material consisted of well-known expressions or proverbs. The musical semantic memory condition activated the superior temporal area and inferior and middle frontal areas in the left hemisphere and the inferior frontal area in the right hemisphere. The verbal semantic memory condition activated the middle temporal region in the left hemisphere and the cerebellum in the right hemisphere. We found that the verbal and musical semantic processes activated a common network extending throughout the left temporal neocortex. In addition, there was a material-dependent topographical preference within this network, with predominantly anterior activation during musical tasks and predominantly posterior activation during semantic verbal tasks. Copyright (c) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  14. The semantic network, lexical access, and reading comprehension in monolingual and bilingual children : An individual differences study

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Spätgens, T.; Schoonen, R.

    Using a semantic priming experiment, the influence of lexical access and knowledge of semantic relations on reading comprehension was studied in Dutch monolingual and bilingual minority children. Both context-independent semantic relations in the form of category coordinates and context-dependent

  15. Lexical priming in Alzheimer's disease and aphasia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Arroyo-Anlló, Eva Maria; Beauchamps, Mireille; Ingrand, Pierre; Neau, Jean Philippe; Gil, Roger

    2013-01-01

    Lexical priming was examined in patients with Alzheimer's disease and in aphasic patients. Control participants were divided into young and elderly [cf. Arroyo-Anlló et al.: Eur J Cogn Psychol 2004;16:535-553]. For lexical priming, a word-stem completion task was used. Normal elderly participants had lexical priming scores that were significantly lower than those of young individuals. Analysis of covariance with age and educational level as covariates showed that the control participants, aphasic and Alzheimer patients did not differ significantly on the lexical priming task. Our results suggest that performance in the lexical priming task diminishes with physiological aging, but is not significantly affected by mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease or by fluent or non-fluent aphasia. Copyright © 2013 S. Karger AG, Basel.

  16. “Pre-semantic” cognition revisited: Critical differences between semantic aphasia and semantic dementia

    OpenAIRE

    Jefferies, Elizabeth; Rogers, Timothy T.; Hopper, Samantha; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.

    2010-01-01

    Patients with semantic dementia show a specific pattern of impairment on both verbal and non-verbal "pre-semantic" tasks, e.g., reading aloud, past tense generation, spelling to dictation, lexical decision, object decision, colour decision and delayed picture copying. All seven tasks are characterised by poorer performance for items that are atypical of the domain and "regularisation errors" (irregular/atypical items are produced as if they were domain-typical). The emergence of this pattern ...

  17. A Prime Example of the Maluma/Takete Effect? Testing for Sound Symbolic Priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sidhu, David M; Pexman, Penny M

    2017-09-01

    Certain nonwords, like maluma and takete, are associated with roundness and sharpness, respectively. However, this has typically been demonstrated using explicit tasks. We investigated whether this association would be detectable using a more implicit measure-a sequential priming task. We began with a replication of the standard Maluma/Takete effect (Experiments 1a and 1b) before examining whether round and sharp nonword primes facilitated the categorization of congruent shapes (Experiment 2). We found modest evidence of a priming effect in response accuracy. We next examined whether nonword primes affected categorization of ambiguous shapes, using visual (Experiment 3) and auditory primes (Experiment 4). We found that ambiguous shapes were categorized as round (sharp) more often following the presentation of a round (sharp) nonword. This suggests that phonemes may activate related shape information which then affects the processing of shapes, and that this association emerges even when participants are not explicitly searching for it. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

  18. Syntactic priming in American Sign Language.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Matthew L Hall

    Full Text Available Psycholinguistic studies of sign language processing provide valuable opportunities to assess whether language phenomena, which are primarily studied in spoken language, are fundamentally shaped by peripheral biology. For example, we know that when given a choice between two syntactically permissible ways to express the same proposition, speakers tend to choose structures that were recently used, a phenomenon known as syntactic priming. Here, we report two experiments testing syntactic priming of a noun phrase construction in American Sign Language (ASL. Experiment 1 shows that second language (L2 signers with normal hearing exhibit syntactic priming in ASL and that priming is stronger when the head noun is repeated between prime and target (the lexical boost effect. Experiment 2 shows that syntactic priming is equally strong among deaf native L1 signers, deaf late L1 learners, and hearing L2 signers. Experiment 2 also tested for, but did not find evidence of, phonological or semantic boosts to syntactic priming in ASL. These results show that despite the profound differences between spoken and signed languages in terms of how they are produced and perceived, the psychological representation of sentence structure (as assessed by syntactic priming operates similarly in sign and speech.

  19. Rapid modulation of spoken word recognition by visual primes.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Okano, Kana; Grainger, Jonathan; Holcomb, Phillip J

    2016-02-01

    In a masked cross-modal priming experiment with ERP recordings, spoken Japanese words were primed with words written in one of the two syllabary scripts of Japanese. An early priming effect, peaking at around 200ms after onset of the spoken word target, was seen in left lateral electrode sites for Katakana primes, and later effects were seen for both Hiragana and Katakana primes on the N400 ERP component. The early effect is thought to reflect the efficiency with which words in Katakana script make contact with sublexical phonological representations involved in spoken language comprehension, due to the particular way this script is used by Japanese readers. This demonstrates fast-acting influences of visual primes on the processing of auditory target words, and suggests that briefly presented visual primes can influence sublexical processing of auditory target words. The later N400 priming effects, on the other hand, most likely reflect cross-modal influences on activity at the level of whole-word phonology and semantics.

  20. Varieties of semantic 'access' deficit in Wernicke's aphasia and semantic aphasia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Thompson, Hannah E; Robson, Holly; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A; Jefferies, Elizabeth

    2015-12-01

    Comprehension deficits are common in stroke aphasia, including in cases with (i) semantic aphasia, characterized by poor executive control of semantic processing across verbal and non-verbal modalities; and (ii) Wernicke's aphasia, associated with poor auditory-verbal comprehension and repetition, plus fluent speech with jargon. However, the varieties of these comprehension problems, and their underlying causes, are not well understood. Both patient groups exhibit some type of semantic 'access' deficit, as opposed to the 'storage' deficits observed in semantic dementia. Nevertheless, existing descriptions suggest that these patients might have different varieties of 'access' impairment-related to difficulty resolving competition (in semantic aphasia) versus initial activation of concepts from sensory inputs (in Wernicke's aphasia). We used a case series design to compare patients with Wernicke's aphasia and those with semantic aphasia on Warrington's paradigmatic assessment of semantic 'access' deficits. In these verbal and non-verbal matching tasks, a small set of semantically-related items are repeatedly presented over several cycles so that the target on one trial becomes a distractor on another (building up interference and eliciting semantic 'blocking' effects). Patients with Wernicke's aphasia and semantic aphasia were distinguished according to lesion location in the temporal cortex, but in each group, some individuals had additional prefrontal damage. Both of these aspects of lesion variability-one that mapped onto classical 'syndromes' and one that did not-predicted aspects of the semantic 'access' deficit. Both semantic aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia cases showed multimodal semantic impairment, although as expected, the Wernicke's aphasia group showed greater deficits on auditory-verbal than picture judgements. Distribution of damage in the temporal lobe was crucial for predicting the initially 'beneficial' effects of stimulus repetition: cases with

  1. Two-to-one colour-response mapping and the presence of semantic conflict in the Stroop task

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Nabil eHasshim

    2014-10-01

    Full Text Available A series of recent studies have utilised the two-to-one mapping paradigm in the Stroop task. In this paradigm, the word red might be presented in blue when both red and blue share the same response key (same-response trials. This manipulation has been used to show the separate contributions of (within semantic category conflict and response conflict to Stroop interference. Such results evidencing semantic category conflict are incompatible with models of the Stroop task that are based on response conflict only. However, the nature of the same-response trials is unclear since they are also likely to involve response facilitation given that both dimensions of the stimulus provide evidence towards the same response key. In this study we explored this possibility by comparing them with three other trial types. We report strong (Bayesian evidence for no statistical difference between same-response and non-colour word neutral trials, faster responses to same-response trials than to non-response set incongruent trials, and no differences between same-response vs. congruent trials when contingency is controlled. Our results suggest that when RT is the dependent variable, same-response trials are not different from neutral trials indicating that they cannot be used reliably to determine the presence or absence of semantic category conflict. In light of these results, the interpretation of a series of recent studies might have to be reassessed.

  2. Specific default mode subnetworks support mentalizing as revealed through opposing network recruitment by social and semantic FMRI tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hyatt, Christopher J; Calhoun, Vince D; Pearlson, Godfrey D; Assaf, Michal

    2015-08-01

    The ability to attribute mental states to others, or "mentalizing," is posited to involve specific subnetworks within the overall default mode network (DMN), but this question needs clarification. To determine which default mode (DM) subnetworks are engaged by mentalizing processes, we assessed task-related recruitment of DM subnetworks. Spatial independent component analysis (sICA) applied to fMRI data using relatively high-order model (75 components). Healthy participants (n = 53, ages 17-60) performed two fMRI tasks: an interactive game involving mentalizing (Domino), a semantic memory task (SORT), and a resting state fMRI scan. sICA of the two tasks split the DMN into 10 subnetworks located in three core regions: medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC; five subnetworks), posterior cingulate/precuneus (PCC/PrC; three subnetworks), and bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Mentalizing events increased recruitment in five of 10 DM subnetworks, located in all three core DMN regions. In addition, three of these five DM subnetworks, one dmPFC subnetwork, one PCC/PrC subnetwork, and the right TPJ subnetwork, showed reduced recruitment by semantic memory task events. The opposing modulation by the two tasks suggests that these three DM subnetworks are specifically engaged in mentalizing. Our findings, therefore, suggest the unique involvement of mentalizing processes in only three of 10 DM subnetworks, and support the importance of the dmPFC, PCC/PrC, and right TPJ in mentalizing as described in prior studies. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

  3. Information and processes underlying semantic and episodic memory across tasks, items, and individuals.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cox, Gregory E; Hemmer, Pernille; Aue, William R; Criss, Amy H

    2018-04-01

    The development of memory theory has been constrained by a focus on isolated tasks rather than the processes and information that are common to situations in which memory is engaged. We present results from a study in which 453 participants took part in five different memory tasks: single-item recognition, associative recognition, cued recall, free recall, and lexical decision. Using hierarchical Bayesian techniques, we jointly analyzed the correlations between tasks within individuals-reflecting the degree to which tasks rely on shared cognitive processes-and within items-reflecting the degree to which tasks rely on the same information conveyed by the item. Among other things, we find that (a) the processes involved in lexical access and episodic memory are largely separate and rely on different kinds of information, (b) access to lexical memory is driven primarily by perceptual aspects of a word, (c) all episodic memory tasks rely to an extent on a set of shared processes which make use of semantic features to encode both single words and associations between words, and (d) recall involves additional processes likely related to contextual cuing and response production. These results provide a large-scale picture of memory across different tasks which can serve to drive the development of comprehensive theories of memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

  4. Morning rapid eye movement sleep naps facilitate broad access to emotional semantic networks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Carr, Michelle; Nielsen, Tore

    2015-03-01

    The goal of the study was to assess semantic priming to emotion and nonemotion cue words using a novel measure of associational breadth for participants who either took rapid eye movement (REM) or nonrapid eye movement (NREM) naps or who remained awake; assess relation of priming to REM sleep consolidation and REM sleep inertia effects. The associational breadth task was applied in both a priming condition, where cue-words were signaled to be memorized prior to sleep (primed), and a nonpriming condition, where cue words were not memorized (nonprimed). Cue words were either emotional (positive, negative) or nonemotional. Participants were randomly assigned to either an awake (WAKE) or a sleep condition, which was subsequently split into NREM or REM groups depending on stage at awakening. Hospital-based sleep laboratory. Fifty-eight healthy participants (22 male) ages 18 to 35 y (Mage = 23.3 ± 4.08 y). The REM group scored higher than the NREM or WAKE groups on primed, but not nonprimed emotional cue words; the effect was stronger for positive than for negative cue words. However, REM time and percent correlated negatively with degree of emotional priming. Priming occurred for REM awakenings but not for NREM awakenings, even when the latter sleep episodes contained some REM sleep. Associational breadth may be selectively consolidated during REM sleep for stimuli that have been tagged as important for future memory retrieval. That priming decreased with REM time and was higher only for REM sleep awakenings is consistent with two explanatory REM sleep processes: REM sleep consolidation serving emotional downregulation and REM sleep inertia. © 2015 Associated Professional Sleep Societies, LLC.

  5. Random reward priming is task-contingent: The robustness of the 1-trial reward priming effect

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Árni Gunnar Ásgeirsson

    2014-04-01

    Full Text Available Consistent financial reward of particular features influences the allocation of visual attention in many ways. More surprising are 1-trial reward priming effects on attention where reward schedules are random and reward on one trial influences attentional allocation on the next. Those findings are thought to reflect that rewarded features become more salient than unrewarded ones on the subsequent trial. Here we attempt to conceptually replicate this effect, testing its generalizability. In three versions of an analogous paradigm to the additional singleton paradigm involving singleton search for a Gabor patch of odd spatial frequency we found no evidence of reward priming, while we only partially replicate the reward priming in the exact original paradigm tested by Hickey and colleagues. The results cast doubt on the proposal that random reward enhances salience, suggested in the original papers, and highlight the need for a more nuanced account. In many other paradigms reward effects have been found to progress gradually, becoming stronger as they build up, and we argue that for robust reward priming, reward schedules need to be more consistent than in the original 1-trial reward priming paradigm.

  6. Translation Priming Effect in Spanish-English Bilinguals

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ramírez Sarmiento, Albeiro Miguel Ángel

    2011-01-01

    This article aims to establish the effects of masked priming by translation equivalents in Spanish-English bilinguals with a high-intermediate level of proficiency in their second language. Its findings serve as evidence to support the hypothesis that semantic representations mediate the mental association among non-cognates from a speaker's first…

  7. The elimination of positive priming with increasing prime duration reflects a transition from perceptual fluency to disfluency rather than bias against primed words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Potter, Kevin W; Donkin, Chris; Huber, David E

    2018-03-01

    With immediate repetition priming of forced choice perceptual identification, short prime durations produce positive priming (i.e., priming the target leads to higher accuracy, while priming the foil leads to lower accuracy). Many theories explain positive priming following short duration primes as reflecting increased perceptual fluency for the primed target (i.e., decreased identification latency). However, most studies only examine either accuracy or response times, rather than considering the joint constraints of response times and accuracy to properly address the role of decision biases and response caution. This is a critical oversight because several theories propose that the transition to negative priming following a long duration prime reflects a decision strategy to compensate for the effect of increased perceptual fluency. In contrast, the nROUSE model of Huber and O'Reilly (2003) explains this transition as reflecting perceptual habituation, and thus a change to perceptual disfluency. We confirmed this prediction by applying a sequential sampling model (the diffusion race model) to accuracy and response time distributions from a new single item same-different version of the priming task. In this way, we measured strategic biases and perceptual fluency in each condition for each subject. The nROUSE model was only applied to accuracy from the original forced-choice version of the priming task. This application of nROUSE produced separate predictions for each subject regarding the degree of fluency and disfluency in each condition, and these predictions were confirmed by the drift rate parameters (i.e., fluency) from the response time model in contrast to the threshold parameters (i.e., bias). Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  8. Nonword Repetition Priming in Lexical Decision Reverses as a Function of Study Task and Speed Stress

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zeelenberg, Rene; Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan; Shiffrin, Richard M.

    2004-01-01

    The authors argue that nonword repetition priming in lexical decision is the net result of 2 opposing processes. First, repeating nonwords in the lexical decision task results in the storage of a memory trace containing the interpretation that the letter string is a nonword; retrieval of this trace leads to an increase in performance for repeated…

  9. The role of domain-general frontal systems in language comprehension: evidence from dual-task interference and semantic ambiguity.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rodd, Jennifer M; Johnsrude, Ingrid S; Davis, Matthew H

    2010-12-01

    Neuroimaging studies have shown that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) plays a critical role in semantic and syntactic aspects of speech comprehension. It appears to be recruited when listeners are required to select the appropriate meaning or syntactic role for words within a sentence. However, this region is also recruited during tasks not involving sentence materials, suggesting that the systems involved in processing ambiguous words within sentences are also recruited for more domain-general tasks that involve the selection of task-relevant information. We use a novel dual-task methodology to assess whether the cognitive system(s) that are engaged in selecting word meanings are also involved in non-sentential tasks. In Experiment 1, listeners were slower to decide whether a visually presented letter is in upper or lower case when the sentence that they are simultaneously listening to contains words with multiple meanings (homophones), compared to closely matched sentences without homophones. Experiment 2 indicates that this interference effect is not tied to the occurrence of the homophone itself, but rather occurs when listeners must reinterpret a sentence that was initially misparsed. These results suggest some overlap between the cognitive system involved in semantic disambiguation and the domain-general process of response selection required for the case-judgement task. This cognitive overlap may reflect neural overlap in the networks supporting these processes, and is consistent with the proposal that domain-general selection processes in inferior frontal regions are critical for language comprehension. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  10. Random reward priming is task-contingent

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Ásgeirsson, Árni Gunnar; Kristjánsson, Árni

    2014-01-01

    Consistent financial reward of particular features influences the allocation of visual attention in many ways. More surprising are 1-trial reward priming effects on attention where reward schedules are random and reward on one trial influences attentional allocation on the next. Those findings...

  11. Semantic distance as a critical factor in icon design for in-car infotainment systems.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Silvennoinen, Johanna M; Kujala, Tuomo; Jokinen, Jussi P P

    2017-11-01

    In-car infotainment systems require icons that enable fluent cognitive information processing and safe interaction while driving. An important issue is how to find an optimised set of icons for different functions in terms of semantic distance. In an optimised icon set, every icon needs to be semantically as close as possible to the function it visually represents and semantically as far as possible from the other functions represented concurrently. In three experiments (N = 21 each), semantic distances of 19 icons to four menu functions were studied with preference rankings, verbal protocols, and the primed product comparisons method. The results show that the primed product comparisons method can be efficiently utilised for finding an optimised set of icons for time-critical applications out of a larger set of icons. The findings indicate the benefits of the novel methodological perspective into the icon design for safety-critical contexts in general. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  12. Language networks associated with computerized semantic indices.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pakhomov, Serguei V S; Jones, David T; Knopman, David S

    2015-01-01

    Tests of generative semantic verbal fluency are widely used to study organization and representation of concepts in the human brain. Previous studies demonstrated that clustering and switching behavior during verbal fluency tasks is supported by multiple brain mechanisms associated with semantic memory and executive control. Previous work relied on manual assessments of semantic relatedness between words and grouping of words into semantic clusters. We investigated a computational linguistic approach to measuring the strength of semantic relatedness between words based on latent semantic analysis of word co-occurrences in a subset of a large online encyclopedia. We computed semantic clustering indices and compared them to brain network connectivity measures obtained with task-free fMRI in a sample consisting of healthy participants and those differentially affected by cognitive impairment. We found that semantic clustering indices were associated with brain network connectivity in distinct areas including fronto-temporal, fronto-parietal and fusiform gyrus regions. This study shows that computerized semantic indices complement traditional assessments of verbal fluency to provide a more complete account of the relationship between brain and verbal behavior involved organization and retrieval of lexical information from memory. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  13. Sensory and semantic activations evoked by action attributes of manipulable objects: Evidence from ERPs

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lee, Chia-lin; Huang, Hsu-Wen; Federmeier, Kara D.; Buxbaum, Laurel J.

    2018-01-01

    “Two route” theories of object-related action processing posit different temporal activation profiles of grasp-to-move actions (rapidly evoked based on object structure) versus skilled use actions (more slowly activated based on semantic knowledge). We capitalized on the exquisite temporal resolution and multidimensionality of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to directly test this hypothesis. Participants viewed manipulable objects (e.g., calculator) preceded by objects sharing either “grasp”, “use”, or no action attributes (e.g., bar of soap, keyboard, earring, respectively), as well as by action-unrelated but taxonomically-related objects (e.g., abacus); participants judged whether the two objects were related. The results showed more positive responses to “grasp-to-move” primed objects than “skilled use” primed objects or unprimed objects starting in the P1 (0–150 ms) time window and continuing onto the subsequent N1 and P2 components (150–300 ms), suggesting that only “grasp-to-move”, but not “skilled use”, actions may facilitate visual attention to object attributes. Furthermore, reliably reduced N400s (300–500 ms), an index of semantic processing, were observed to taxonomically primed and “skilled use” primed objects relative to unprimed objects, suggesting that “skilled use” action attributes are a component of distributed, multimodal semantic representations of objects. Together, our findings provide evidence supporting two-route theories by demonstrating that “grasp-to-move” and “skilled use” actions impact different aspects of object processing and highlight the relationship of “skilled use” information to other aspects of semantic memory. PMID:29183777

  14. Semantic search during divergent thinking.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hass, Richard W

    2017-09-01

    Divergent thinking, as a method of examining creative cognition, has not been adequately analyzed in the context of modern cognitive theories. This article casts divergent thinking responding in the context of theories of memory search. First, it was argued that divergent thinking tasks are similar to semantic fluency tasks, but are more constrained, and less well structured. Next, response time distributions from 54 participants were analyzed for temporal and semantic clustering. Participants responded to two prompts from the alternative uses test: uses for a brick and uses for a bottle, for two minutes each. Participants' cumulative response curves were negatively accelerating, in line with theories of search of associative memory. However, results of analyses of semantic and temporal clustering suggested that clustering is less evident in alternative uses responding compared to semantic fluency tasks. This suggests either that divergent thinking responding does not involve an exhaustive search through a clustered memory trace, but rather that the process is more exploratory, yielding fewer overall responses that tend to drift away from close associates of the divergent thinking prompt. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  15. Varieties of semantic ‘access’ deficit in Wernicke’s aphasia and semantic aphasia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Robson, Holly; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.; Jefferies, Elizabeth

    2015-01-01

    Comprehension deficits are common in stroke aphasia, including in cases with (i) semantic aphasia, characterized by poor executive control of semantic processing across verbal and non-verbal modalities; and (ii) Wernicke’s aphasia, associated with poor auditory–verbal comprehension and repetition, plus fluent speech with jargon. However, the varieties of these comprehension problems, and their underlying causes, are not well understood. Both patient groups exhibit some type of semantic ‘access’ deficit, as opposed to the ‘storage’ deficits observed in semantic dementia. Nevertheless, existing descriptions suggest that these patients might have different varieties of ‘access’ impairment—related to difficulty resolving competition (in semantic aphasia) versus initial activation of concepts from sensory inputs (in Wernicke’s aphasia). We used a case series design to compare patients with Wernicke’s aphasia and those with semantic aphasia on Warrington’s paradigmatic assessment of semantic ‘access’ deficits. In these verbal and non-verbal matching tasks, a small set of semantically-related items are repeatedly presented over several cycles so that the target on one trial becomes a distractor on another (building up interference and eliciting semantic ‘blocking’ effects). Patients with Wernicke’s aphasia and semantic aphasia were distinguished according to lesion location in the temporal cortex, but in each group, some individuals had additional prefrontal damage. Both of these aspects of lesion variability—one that mapped onto classical ‘syndromes’ and one that did not—predicted aspects of the semantic ‘access’ deficit. Both semantic aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia cases showed multimodal semantic impairment, although as expected, the Wernicke’s aphasia group showed greater deficits on auditory-verbal than picture judgements. Distribution of damage in the temporal lobe was crucial for predicting the initially

  16. The Effect of Concurrent Semantic Categorization on Delayed Serial Recall

    Science.gov (United States)

    Acheson, Daniel J.; MacDonald, Maryellen C.; Postle, Bradley R.

    2010-01-01

    The influence of semantic processing on the serial ordering of items in short-term memory was explored using a novel dual-task paradigm. Subjects engaged in two picture judgment tasks while simultaneously performing delayed serial recall. List material varied in the presence of phonological overlap (Experiments 1 and 2) and in semantic content (concrete words in Experiment 1 and 3; nonwords in Experiments 2 and 3). Picture judgments varied in the extent to which they required accessing visual semantic information (i.e., semantic categorization and line orientation judgments). Results showed that, relative to line orientation judgments, engaging in semantic categorization judgments increased the proportion of item ordering errors for concrete lists but did not affect error proportions for nonword lists. Furthermore, although more ordering errors were observed for phonologically similar relative to dissimilar lists, no interactions were observed between the phonological overlap and picture judgment task manipulations. These results thus demonstrate that lexical-semantic representations can affect the serial ordering of items in short-term memory. Furthermore, the dual-task paradigm provides a new method for examining when and how semantic representations affect memory performance. PMID:21058880

  17. The contribution of executive control to semantic cognition: Convergent evidence from semantic aphasia and executive dysfunction

    OpenAIRE

    Thompson, Hannah E; Almaghyuli, Azizah; Noonan, Krist A.; Barak, Ohr; Lambon Ralph, Matthew; Jefferies, Elizabeth

    2018-01-01

    Semantic cognition, as described by the Controlled Semantic Cognition (CSC) framework (Rogers, Patterson, Jefferies, & Lambon Ralph, 2015), involves two key components: activation of coherent, generalizable concepts within a heteromodal ‘hub’ in combination with modality-specific features (spokes), and a constraining mechanism that manipulates and gates this knowledge to generate time- and task- appropriate behaviour. Executive-semantic goal representations, largely supported by executive...

  18. Total sleep deprivation does not significantly degrade semantic encoding.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Honn, K A; Grant, D A; Hinson, J M; Whitney, P; Van Dongen, Hpa

    2018-01-17

    Sleep deprivation impairs performance on cognitive tasks, but it is unclear which cognitive processes it degrades. We administered a semantic matching task with variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and both speeded and self-paced trial blocks. The task was administered at the baseline and 24 hours later after 30.8 hours of total sleep deprivation (TSD) or matching well-rested control. After sleep deprivation, the 20% slowest response times (RTs) were significantly increased. However, the semantic encoding time component of the RTs remained at baseline level. Thus, the performance impairment induced by sleep deprivation on this task occurred in cognitive processes downstream of semantic encoding.

  19. Contrasting effects of self-schema priming on lexical decisions and interpersonal stroop task performance: evidence for a cognitive/interactionist model of interpersonal dependency.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bornstein, Robert F; Ng, H Mei; Gallagher, Heather A; Kloss, Deanna M; Regier, Natalie G

    2005-06-01

    Four experiments tested a key tenet of Bornstein's (1992, 1993) cognitive/interactionist (C/I) model of interpersonal dependency: that priming the helpless self-schema (HSS) alters processing of dependency-related information in dependent--but not nondependent--individuals. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed the effects of subliminal lexical priming and an emotional priming manipulation on lexical decision (LD) judgments for dependency-related words and control words. Experiments 3 and 4 assessed the effects of these same priming procedures on Interpersonal Stroop Task (IST) performance. As predicted, priming the HSS produced contrasting effects on different outcome measures, decreasing LD latencies, but increasing IST response times. Results are discussed in the context of the C/I model, and suggestions for future studies are offered.

  20. Interference of spoken word recognition through phonological priming from visual objects and printed words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    McQueen, James M; Huettig, Falk

    2014-01-01

    Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the influence of preexposure to pictures and printed words on the speed of spoken word recognition. Targets for auditory lexical decision were spoken Dutch words and nonwords, presented in isolation (Experiments 1 and 2) or after a short phrase (Experiment 3). Auditory stimuli were preceded by primes, which were pictures (Experiments 1 and 3) or those pictures' printed names (Experiment 2). Prime-target pairs were phonologically onset related (e.g., pijl-pijn, arrow-pain), were from the same semantic category (e.g., pijl-zwaard, arrow-sword), or were unrelated on both dimensions. Phonological interference and semantic facilitation were observed in all experiments. Priming magnitude was similar for pictures and printed words and did not vary with picture viewing time or number of pictures in the display (either one or four). These effects arose even though participants were not explicitly instructed to name the pictures and where strategic naming would interfere with lexical decision making. This suggests that, by default, processing of related pictures and printed words influences how quickly we recognize spoken words.

  1. The contribution of executive control to semantic cognition: Convergent evidence from semantic aphasia and executive dysfunction

    OpenAIRE

    Thompson, Hannah; Almaghyuli, Azizah; Noonan, Krist A.; barak, Ohr; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.; Jefferies, Elizabeth

    2018-01-01

    Semantic cognition, as described by the controlled semantic cognition (CSC) framework (Rogers et al., 2015, Neuropsychologia, 76, 220), involves two key components: activation of coherent, generalizable concepts within a heteromodal ‘hub’ in combination with modality-specific features (spokes), and a constraining mechanism that manipulates and gates this knowledge to generate time- and task-appropriate behaviour. Executive–semantic goal representations, largely supported by executive regions ...

  2. Syntactic Priming As a Test of Argument Structure: A Self-paced Reading Experiment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Isabel Oltra-Massuet

    2017-08-01

    Full Text Available Using data from a behavioral structural priming experiment, we test two competing theoretical approaches to argument structure, which attribute different configurations to (intransitive structures. These approaches make different claims about the relationship between unergatives and transitive structures selecting either a DP complement or a small clause complement in structurally unambiguous sentences, thus making different predictions about priming relations between them. Using statistical tools that combine a factorial 6 × 6 within subjects ANOVA, a mixed effects ANCOVA and a linear mixed effects regression model, we report syntactic priming effects in comprehension, which suggest a stronger predictive contribution of a model that supports an interpretive semantics view of syntax, whereby syntactic structures do not necessarily reflect argument/event structure in semantically unambiguous configurations. They also contribute novel experimental evidence that correlate representational complexity with language processing in the mind and brain. Our study further upholds the validity of combining quantitative methods and theoretical approaches to linguistics for advancing our knowledge of syntactic phenomena.

  3. Overlap in the functional neural systems involved in semantic and episodic memory retrieval.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rajah, M N; McIntosh, A R

    2005-03-01

    Neuroimaging and neuropsychological data suggest that episodic and semantic memory may be mediated by distinct neural systems. However, an alternative perspective is that episodic and semantic memory represent different modes of processing within a single declarative memory system. To examine whether the multiple or the unitary system view better represents the data we conducted a network analysis using multivariate partial least squares (PLS ) activation analysis followed by covariance structural equation modeling (SEM) of positron emission tomography data obtained while healthy adults performed episodic and semantic verbal retrieval tasks. It is argued that if performance of episodic and semantic retrieval tasks are mediated by different memory systems, then there should differences in both regional activations and interregional correlations related to each type of retrieval task, respectively. The PLS results identified brain regions that were differentially active during episodic retrieval versus semantic retrieval. Regions that showed maximal differences in regional activity between episodic retrieval tasks were used to construct separate functional models for episodic and semantic retrieval. Omnibus tests of these functional models failed to find a significant difference across tasks for both functional models. The pattern of path coefficients for the episodic retrieval model were not different across tasks, nor were the path coefficients for the semantic retrieval model. The SEM results suggest that the same memory network/system was engaged across tasks, given the similarities in path coefficients. Therefore, activation differences between episodic and semantic retrieval may ref lect variation along a continuum of processing during task performance within the context of a single memory system.

  4. Effect of aging, education, reading and writing, semantic processing and depression symptoms on verbal fluency

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    André Luiz Moraes

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available Verbal fluency tasks are widely used in (clinical neuropsychology to evaluate components of executive functioning and lexical-semantic processing (linguistic and semantic memory. Performance in those tasks may be affected by several variables, such as age, education and diseases. This study investigated whether aging, education, reading and writing frequency, performance in semantic judgment tasks and depression symptoms predict the performance in unconstrained, phonemic and semantic fluency tasks. This study sample comprised 260 healthy adults aged 19 to 75 years old. The Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple regression models were used for data analysis. The variables under analysis were associated in different ways and had different levels of contribution according to the type of verbal fluency task. Education had the greatest effect on verbal fluency tasks. There was a greater effect of age on semantic fluency than on phonemic tasks. The semantic judgment tasks predicted the verbal fluency performance alone or in combination with other variables. These findings corroborate the importance of education in cognition supporting the hypothesis of a cognitive reserve and confirming the contribution of lexical-semantic processing to verbal fluency.

  5. High Performance Descriptive Semantic Analysis of Semantic Graph Databases

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Joslyn, Cliff A.; Adolf, Robert D.; al-Saffar, Sinan; Feo, John T.; Haglin, David J.; Mackey, Greg E.; Mizell, David W.

    2011-06-02

    As semantic graph database technology grows to address components ranging from extant large triple stores to SPARQL endpoints over SQL-structured relational databases, it will become increasingly important to be able to understand their inherent semantic structure, whether codified in explicit ontologies or not. Our group is researching novel methods for what we call descriptive semantic analysis of RDF triplestores, to serve purposes of analysis, interpretation, visualization, and optimization. But data size and computational complexity makes it increasingly necessary to bring high performance computational resources to bear on this task. Our research group built a novel high performance hybrid system comprising computational capability for semantic graph database processing utilizing the large multi-threaded architecture of the Cray XMT platform, conventional servers, and large data stores. In this paper we describe that architecture and our methods, and present the results of our analyses of basic properties, connected components, namespace interaction, and typed paths such for the Billion Triple Challenge 2010 dataset.

  6. Semantic Memory in the Clinical Progression of Alzheimer Disease.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tchakoute, Christophe T; Sainani, Kristin L; Henderson, Victor W

    2017-09-01

    Semantic memory measures may be useful in tracking and predicting progression of Alzheimer disease. We investigated relationships among semantic memory tasks and their 1-year predictive value in women with Alzheimer disease. We conducted secondary analyses of a randomized clinical trial of raloxifene in 42 women with late-onset mild-to-moderate Alzheimer disease. We assessed semantic memory with tests of oral confrontation naming, category fluency, semantic recognition and semantic naming, and semantic density in written narrative discourse. We measured global cognition (Alzheimer Disease Assessment Scale, cognitive subscale), dementia severity (Clinical Dementia Rating sum of boxes), and daily function (Activities of Daily Living Inventory) at baseline and 1 year. At baseline and 1 year, most semantic memory scores correlated highly or moderately with each other and with global cognition, dementia severity, and daily function. Semantic memory task performance at 1 year had worsened one-third to one-half standard deviation. Factor analysis of baseline test scores distinguished processes in semantic and lexical retrieval (semantic recognition, semantic naming, confrontation naming) from processes in lexical search (semantic density, category fluency). The semantic-lexical retrieval factor predicted global cognition at 1 year. Considered separately, baseline confrontation naming and category fluency predicted dementia severity, while semantic recognition and a composite of semantic recognition and semantic naming predicted global cognition. No individual semantic memory test predicted daily function. Semantic-lexical retrieval and lexical search may represent distinct aspects of semantic memory. Semantic memory processes are sensitive to cognitive decline and dementia severity in Alzheimer disease.

  7. Comparing Repetition Priming Effects in Words and Arithmetic Equations: Robust Priming Regardless of Color or Response Hand Change

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ailsa Humphries

    2018-01-01

    Full Text Available Previous studies have shown that stimulus repetition can lead to reliable behavioral improvements. Although this repetition priming (RP effect has been reported in a number of paradigms using a variety of stimuli including words, objects, and faces, only a few studies have investigated mathematical cognition involving arithmetic computation, and no prior research has directly compared RP effects in a linguistic task with an arithmetic task. In two experiments, we used a within-subjects design to investigate and compare the magnitude of RP, and the effects of changing the color or the response hand for repeated, otherwise identical, stimuli in a word and an arithmetic categorization task. The results show that the magnitude of RP was comparable between the two tasks and that changing the color or the response hand had a negligible effect on priming in either task. These results extended previous findings in mathematical cognition. They also indicate that priming does not vary with stimulus domain. The implications of the results were discussed with reference to both facilitation of component processes and episodic memory retrieval of stimulus–response binding.

  8. Comparing Repetition Priming Effects in Words and Arithmetic Equations: Robust Priming Regardless of Color or Response Hand Change.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Humphries, Ailsa; Chen, Zhe; Neumann, Ewald

    2017-01-01

    Previous studies have shown that stimulus repetition can lead to reliable behavioral improvements. Although this repetition priming (RP) effect has been reported in a number of paradigms using a variety of stimuli including words, objects, and faces, only a few studies have investigated mathematical cognition involving arithmetic computation, and no prior research has directly compared RP effects in a linguistic task with an arithmetic task. In two experiments, we used a within-subjects design to investigate and compare the magnitude of RP, and the effects of changing the color or the response hand for repeated, otherwise identical, stimuli in a word and an arithmetic categorization task. The results show that the magnitude of RP was comparable between the two tasks and that changing the color or the response hand had a negligible effect on priming in either task. These results extended previous findings in mathematical cognition. They also indicate that priming does not vary with stimulus domain. The implications of the results were discussed with reference to both facilitation of component processes and episodic memory retrieval of stimulus-response binding.

  9. Implicit Phonological and Semantic Processing in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jednorog, K.; Marchewka, A.; Tacikowski, P.; Grabowska, A.

    2010-01-01

    Dyslexia is characterized by a core phonological deficit, although recent studies indicate that semantic impairment also contributes to this condition. In this study, event-related potentials (ERP) were used to examine whether the N400 wave in dyslexic children is modulated by phonological or semantic priming, similarly to age-matched controls.…

  10. Semantic Tagging with Deep Residual Networks

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Bjerva, Johannes; Plank, Barbara; Bos, Johan

    2016-01-01

    We propose a novel semantic tagging task, semtagging, tailored for the purpose of multilingual semantic parsing, and present the first tagger using deep residual networks (ResNets). Our tagger uses both word and character representations and includes a novel residual bypass architecture. We evaluate

  11. Efecto de la riqueza semántica en distintos niveles del procesamiento léxico-semántico (Semantic richness effect at different levels of lexical-semantic processing

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mauro Fragapane

    2017-08-01

    Full Text Available Semantic richness is a multidimensional construct that refers to the extent of variability of information associated with the meaning of a word. The Number of Features (NoF is a dimension of semantic richness that has been shown to have a major influence on lexical and semantic processing. Several studies have shown that concepts with a higher NoF allow faster lexical processing than those with a lower NoF. The current study is the first to use a NoF measure based on norms obtained from a sample of Spanish-speaking participants. The aim was to study the effect of this variable in visual word recognition. The sample included 90 young native Spanish-speaking adults. Three tasks were administered that require access to different lexico-semantic levels: lexical decision, concreteness semantic categorization (concrete/abstract, and domain semantic categorization (living/non-living. A semantic richness effect was found in lexical decision and domain semantic categorization tasks, with greater effect in the latter task. Results are interpreted within the framework of the General Domain Interactive Activation model.

  12. Brand priming effect on consumers’ financial risk taking behavior

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Danielle Mantovani

    Full Text Available Abstract Taking the perspective of brand priming theory, this study proposes that brands associated with an audacious personality trait may influence consumers to be take more risks in making subsequent decisions. Two experiments, run in sport brands contexts, showed that individuals exposed to brands with high (vs. low audacity traits demonstrated a higher rate of risk taking in financial decisions. The studies also showed that this effect is moderated by individuals’ experience with the financial market. This moderation suggests that there was an activation of a goal not just semantic activation, but through the brand priming. This research provides insights into how today's consumers deal with brand priming effects in risky choice settings. From a managerial perspective, it can help managers to understand the likely effects of brand priming on behavior and better predict the probability of risk aversion or risk seeking outcomes.

  13. Affective priming using facial expressions modulates liking for abstract art.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Flexas, Albert; Rosselló, Jaume; Christensen, Julia F; Nadal, Marcos; Olivera La Rosa, Antonio; Munar, Enric

    2013-01-01

    We examined the influence of affective priming on the appreciation of abstract artworks using an evaluative priming task. Facial primes (showing happiness, disgust or no emotion) were presented under brief (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, SOA = 20 ms) and extended (SOA = 300 ms) conditions. Differences in aesthetic liking for abstract paintings depending on the emotion expressed in the preceding primes provided a measure of the priming effect. The results showed that, for the extended SOA, artworks were liked more when preceded by happiness primes and less when preceded by disgust primes. Facial expressions of happiness, though not of disgust, exerted similar effects in the brief SOA condition. Subjective measures and a forced-choice task revealed no evidence of prime awareness in the suboptimal condition. Our results are congruent with findings showing that the affective transfer elicited by priming biases evaluative judgments, extending previous research to the domain of aesthetic appreciation.

  14. Affective priming using facial expressions modulates liking for abstract art.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Albert Flexas

    Full Text Available We examined the influence of affective priming on the appreciation of abstract artworks using an evaluative priming task. Facial primes (showing happiness, disgust or no emotion were presented under brief (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, SOA = 20 ms and extended (SOA = 300 ms conditions. Differences in aesthetic liking for abstract paintings depending on the emotion expressed in the preceding primes provided a measure of the priming effect. The results showed that, for the extended SOA, artworks were liked more when preceded by happiness primes and less when preceded by disgust primes. Facial expressions of happiness, though not of disgust, exerted similar effects in the brief SOA condition. Subjective measures and a forced-choice task revealed no evidence of prime awareness in the suboptimal condition. Our results are congruent with findings showing that the affective transfer elicited by priming biases evaluative judgments, extending previous research to the domain of aesthetic appreciation.

  15. Episodic but not semantic order memory difficulties in autism spectrum disorder: evidence from the Historical Figures Task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gaigg, Sebastian B; Bowler, Dermot M; Gardiner, John M

    2014-01-01

    Considerable evidence suggests that the episodic memory system operates abnormally in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) whereas the functions of the semantic memory system are relatively preserved. Here we show that the same dissociation also applies to the domain of order memory. We asked adult participants to order the names of famous historical figures either according to their chronological order in history (probing semantic memory) or according to a random sequence shown once on a screen (probing episodic memory). As predicted, adults with ASD performed less well than age- and IQ-matched comparison individuals only on the episodic task. This observation is of considerable importance in the context of developmental theory because semantic and episodic order memory abilities can be dissociated in typically developing infants before they reach the age at which the behavioural markers associated with ASD are first apparent. This raises the possibility that early emerging memory abnormalities play a role in shaping the developmental trajectory of the disorder. We discuss the broader implications of this possibility and highlight the urgent need for greater scrutiny of memory competences in ASD early in development.

  16. Varieties of semantic cognition revealed through simultaneous decomposition of intrinsic brain connectivity and behaviour.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vatansever, Deniz; Bzdok, Danilo; Wang, Hao-Ting; Mollo, Giovanna; Sormaz, Mladen; Murphy, Charlotte; Karapanagiotidis, Theodoros; Smallwood, Jonathan; Jefferies, Elizabeth

    2017-09-01

    Contemporary theories assume that semantic cognition emerges from a neural architecture in which different component processes are combined to produce aspects of conceptual thought and behaviour. In addition to the state-level, momentary variation in brain connectivity, individuals may also differ in their propensity to generate particular configurations of such components, and these trait-level differences may relate to individual differences in semantic cognition. We tested this view by exploring how variation in intrinsic brain functional connectivity between semantic nodes in fMRI was related to performance on a battery of semantic tasks in 154 healthy participants. Through simultaneous decomposition of brain functional connectivity and semantic task performance, we identified distinct components of semantic cognition at rest. In a subsequent validation step, these data-driven components demonstrated explanatory power for neural responses in an fMRI-based semantic localiser task and variation in self-generated thoughts during the resting-state scan. Our findings showed that good performance on harder semantic tasks was associated with relative segregation at rest between frontal brain regions implicated in controlled semantic retrieval and the default mode network. Poor performance on easier tasks was linked to greater coupling between the same frontal regions and the anterior temporal lobe; a pattern associated with deliberate, verbal thematic thoughts at rest. We also identified components that related to qualities of semantic cognition: relatively good performance on pictorial semantic tasks was associated with greater separation of angular gyrus from frontal control sites and greater integration with posterior cingulate and anterior temporal cortex. In contrast, good speech production was linked to the separation of angular gyrus, posterior cingulate and temporal lobe regions. Together these data show that quantitative and qualitative variation in semantic

  17. Automatic semantic encoding in verbal short-term memory: evidence from the concreteness effect.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Campoy, Guillermo; Castellà, Judit; Provencio, Violeta; Hitch, Graham J; Baddeley, Alan D

    2015-01-01

    The concreteness effect in verbal short-term memory (STM) tasks is assumed to be a consequence of semantic encoding in STM, with immediate recall of concrete words benefiting from richer semantic representations. We used the concreteness effect to test the hypothesis that semantic encoding in standard verbal STM tasks is a consequence of controlled, attention-demanding mechanisms of strategic semantic retrieval and encoding. Experiment 1 analysed the effect of presentation rate, with slow presentations being assumed to benefit strategic, time-dependent semantic encoding. Experiments 2 and 3 provided a more direct test of the strategic hypothesis by introducing three different concurrent attention-demanding tasks. Although Experiment 1 showed a larger concreteness effect with slow presentations, the following two experiments yielded strong evidence against the strategic hypothesis. Limiting available attention resources by concurrent tasks reduced global memory performance, but the concreteness effect was equivalent to that found in control conditions. We conclude that semantic effects in STM result from automatic semantic encoding and provide tentative explanations for the interaction between the concreteness effect and the presentation rate.

  18. Recognizable or Not: Towards Image Semantic Quality Assessment for Compression

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Dong; Wang, Dandan; Li, Houqiang

    2017-12-01

    Traditionally, image compression was optimized for the pixel-wise fidelity or the perceptual quality of the compressed images given a bit-rate budget. But recently, compressed images are more and more utilized for automatic semantic analysis tasks such as recognition and retrieval. For these tasks, we argue that the optimization target of compression is no longer perceptual quality, but the utility of the compressed images in the given automatic semantic analysis task. Accordingly, we propose to evaluate the quality of the compressed images neither at pixel level nor at perceptual level, but at semantic level. In this paper, we make preliminary efforts towards image semantic quality assessment (ISQA), focusing on the task of optical character recognition (OCR) from compressed images. We propose a full-reference ISQA measure by comparing the features extracted from text regions of original and compressed images. We then propose to integrate the ISQA measure into an image compression scheme. Experimental results show that our proposed ISQA measure is much better than PSNR and SSIM in evaluating the semantic quality of compressed images; accordingly, adopting our ISQA measure to optimize compression for OCR leads to significant bit-rate saving compared to using PSNR or SSIM. Moreover, we perform subjective test about text recognition from compressed images, and observe that our ISQA measure has high consistency with subjective recognizability. Our work explores new dimensions in image quality assessment, and demonstrates promising direction to achieve higher compression ratio for specific semantic analysis tasks.

  19. Disturbance of semantic processing in temporal lobe epilepsy demonstrated with scalp ERPs.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Miyamoto, T; Katayama, J I; Kohsaka, M; Koyama, T

    2000-12-01

    We investigated event-related potentials (N400, LPC and CNV) elicited in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients and control subjects from scalp electrodes, using a word-pair category matching paradigm. Each prime consisted of a Japanese noun (constructed from 2-4 characters of the Hiragana) followed by a Chinese character (Kanji) as the target, the latter representing one of five semantic categories. There were two equally probable target conditions: match or mismatch. Each target was preceded by a prime, either belonging to, or not belonging to, the same semantic category. The subjects were required to respond with a specified button press to the given target, according to the condition. We found RTs to be longer under the mismatch condition in both subject groups. The N400 amplitude was reduced in TLE subjects under both conditions, although LPC and CNV amplitudes showed no significant differences. These results suggest that scalp N400 is capable of demonstrating disturbance of semantic processing in TLE non-invasively. Copyright 2000 BEA Trading Ltd.

  20. L1 and L2 Spoken Word Processing: Evidence from Divided Attention Paradigm.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shafiee Nahrkhalaji, Saeedeh; Lotfi, Ahmad Reza; Koosha, Mansour

    2016-10-01

    The present study aims to reveal some facts concerning first language (L 1 ) and second language (L 2 ) spoken-word processing in unbalanced proficient bilinguals using behavioral measures. The intention here is to examine the effects of auditory repetition word priming and semantic priming in first and second languages of these bilinguals. The other goal is to explore the effects of attention manipulation on implicit retrieval of perceptual and conceptual properties of spoken L 1 and L 2 words. In so doing, the participants performed auditory word priming and semantic priming as memory tests in their L 1 and L 2 . In a half of the trials of each experiment, they carried out the memory test while simultaneously performing a secondary task in visual modality. The results revealed that effects of auditory word priming and semantic priming were present when participants processed L 1 and L 2 words in full attention condition. Attention manipulation could reduce priming magnitude in both experiments in L 2 . Moreover, L 2 word retrieval increases the reaction times and reduces accuracy on the simultaneous secondary task to protect its own accuracy and speed.

  1. Does semantic impairment explain surface dyslexia? VLSM evidence for a double dissociation between regularization errors in reading and semantic errors in picture naming

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sara Pillay

    2014-04-01

    Full Text Available The correlation between semantic deficits and exception word regularization errors ("surface dyslexia" in semantic dementia has been taken as strong evidence for involvement of semantic codes in exception word pronunciation. Rare cases with semantic deficits but no exception word reading deficit have been explained as due to individual differences in reading strategy, but this account is hotly debated. Semantic dementia is a diffuse process that always includes semantic impairment, making lesion localization difficult and independent assessment of semantic deficits and reading errors impossible. We addressed this problem using voxel-based lesion symptom mapping in 38 patients with left hemisphere stroke. Patients were all right-handed, native English speakers and at least 6 months from stroke onset. Patients performed an oral reading task that included 80 exception words (words with inconsistent orthographic-phonologic correspondence, e.g., pint, plaid, glove. Regularization errors were defined as plausible but incorrect pronunciations based on application of spelling-sound correspondence rules (e.g., 'plaid' pronounced as "played". Two additional tests examined explicit semantic knowledge and retrieval. The first measured semantic substitution errors during naming of 80 standard line drawings of objects. This error type is generally presumed to arise at the level of concept selection. The second test (semantic matching required patients to match a printed sample word (e.g., bus with one of two alternative choice words (e.g., car, taxi on the basis of greater similarity of meaning. Lesions were labeled on high-resolution T1 MRI volumes using a semi-automated segmentation method, followed by diffeomorphic registration to a template. VLSM used an ANCOVA approach to remove variance due to age, education, and total lesion volume. Regularization errors during reading were correlated with damage in the posterior half of the middle temporal gyrus and

  2. Language production in a shared task: Cumulative Semantic Interference from self- and other-produced context words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hoedemaker, Renske S; Ernst, Jessica; Meyer, Antje S; Belke, Eva

    2017-01-01

    This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this paradigm, naming latencies have been found to increase for successive presentations of exemplars from the same category, a phenomenon known as Cumulative Semantic Interference (CSI). As expected, the joint-naming task showed a within-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies increased as a function of the number of category exemplars named previously by the participant (self-produced items). Crucially, we also observed an across-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies slowed as a function of the number of category members named by the participant's task partner (other-produced items). The magnitude of the across-speaker CSI effect did not vary as a function of whether or not the listening participant could see the pictures their partner was naming. The observation of across-speaker CSI suggests that the effect originates at the conceptual level of the language system, as proposed by Belke's (2013) Conceptual Accumulation account. Whereas self-produced and other-produced words both resulted in a CSI effect on naming latencies, post-experiment free recall rates were higher for self-produced than other-produced items. Together, these results suggest that both speaking and listening result in implicit learning at the conceptual level of the language system but that these effects are independent of explicit learning as indicated by item recall. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  3. Long-term repetition priming with symmetrical polygons and words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kersteen-Tucker, Z

    1991-01-01

    In two different tasks, subjects were asked to make lexical decisions (word or nonword) and symmetry judgments (symmetrical or nonsymmetrical) about two-dimensional polygons. In both tasks, every stimulus was repeated at one of four lags (0, 1, 4, or 8 items interposed between the first and second stimulus presentations). This paradigm, known as repetition priming, revealed comparable short-term priming (Lag 0) and long-term priming (Lags 1, 4, and 8) both for symmetrical polygons and for words. A shorter term component (Lags 0 and 1) of priming was observed for nonwords, and only very short-term priming (Lag 0) was observed for nonsymmetrical polygons. These results indicate that response facilitation accruing from repeated exposure can be observed for stimuli that have no preexisting memory representations and suggest that perceptual factors contribute to repetition-priming effects.

  4. The Influence of Concreteness of Concepts on the Integration of Novel Words into the Semantic Network.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ding, Jinfeng; Liu, Wenjuan; Yang, Yufang

    2017-01-01

    On the basis of previous studies revealing a processing advantage of concrete words over abstract words, the current study aimed to further explore the influence of concreteness on the integration of novel words into semantic memory with the event related potential (ERP) technique. In the experiment during the learning phase participants read two-sentence contexts and inferred the meaning of novel words. The novel words were two-character non-words in Chinese language. Their meaning was either a concrete or abstract known concept which could be inferred from the contexts. During the testing phase participants performed a lexical decision task in which the learned novel words served as primes for either their corresponding concepts, semantically related or unrelated targets. For the concrete novel words, the semantically related words belonged to the same semantic categories with their corresponding concepts. For the abstract novel words, the semantically related words were synonyms of their corresponding concepts. The unrelated targets were real words which were concrete or abstract for the concrete or abstract novel words respectively. The ERP results showed that the corresponding concepts and the semantically related words elicited smaller N400s than the unrelated words. The N400 effect was not modulated by the concreteness of the concepts. In addition, the concrete corresponding concepts elicited a smaller late positive component (LPC) than the concrete unrelated words. This LPC effect was absent for the abstract words. The results indicate that although both concrete and abstract novel words can be acquired and linked to their related words in the semantic network after a short learning phase, the concrete novel words are learned better. Our findings support the (extended) dual coding theory and broaden our understanding of adult word learning and changes in concept organization.

  5. The Influence of Concreteness of Concepts on the Integration of Novel Words into the Semantic Network

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jinfeng Ding

    2017-12-01

    Full Text Available On the basis of previous studies revealing a processing advantage of concrete words over abstract words, the current study aimed to further explore the influence of concreteness on the integration of novel words into semantic memory with the event related potential (ERP technique. In the experiment during the learning phase participants read two-sentence contexts and inferred the meaning of novel words. The novel words were two-character non-words in Chinese language. Their meaning was either a concrete or abstract known concept which could be inferred from the contexts. During the testing phase participants performed a lexical decision task in which the learned novel words served as primes for either their corresponding concepts, semantically related or unrelated targets. For the concrete novel words, the semantically related words belonged to the same semantic categories with their corresponding concepts. For the abstract novel words, the semantically related words were synonyms of their corresponding concepts. The unrelated targets were real words which were concrete or abstract for the concrete or abstract novel words respectively. The ERP results showed that the corresponding concepts and the semantically related words elicited smaller N400s than the unrelated words. The N400 effect was not modulated by the concreteness of the concepts. In addition, the concrete corresponding concepts elicited a smaller late positive component (LPC than the concrete unrelated words. This LPC effect was absent for the abstract words. The results indicate that although both concrete and abstract novel words can be acquired and linked to their related words in the semantic network after a short learning phase, the concrete novel words are learned better. Our findings support the (extended dual coding theory and broaden our understanding of adult word learning and changes in concept organization.

  6. Emotion-induced impairments in speeded word recognition tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zeelenberg, René; Bocanegra, Bruno R; Pecher, Diane

    2011-01-01

    Recent studies show that emotional stimuli impair the identification of subsequently presented, briefly flashed stimuli. In the present study, we investigated whether emotional distractors (primes) impaired target processing when presentation of the target stimulus was not impoverished. In lexical decision, animacy decision, rhyme decision, and nonword naming, targets were presented in such a manner that they were clearly visible (i.e., targets were not masked and presented until participants responded). In all tasks taboo-sexual distractors caused a slowdown in responding to the subsequent neutral target. Our results indicate that the detrimental effects of emotional distractors are not confined to paradigms in which visibility of the target is limited. Moreover, impairments were obtained even when semantic processing of stimuli was not required.

  7. Neural correlates underlying musical semantic memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Groussard, M; Viader, F; Landeau, B; Desgranges, B; Eustache, F; Platel, H

    2009-07-01

    Numerous functional imaging studies have examined the neural basis of semantic memory mainly using verbal and visuospatial materials. Musical material also allows an original way to explore semantic memory processes. We used PET imaging to determine the neural substrates that underlie musical semantic memory using different tasks and stimuli. The results of three PET studies revealed a greater involvement of the anterior part of the temporal lobe. Concerning clinical observations and our neuroimaging data, the musical lexicon (and most widely musical semantic memory) appears to be sustained by a temporo-prefrontal cerebral network involving right and left cerebral regions.

  8. Elucidating semantic disorganisation from a word comprehension task: do patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder show differential processing of nouns, verbs and adjectives?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rossell, Susan L; Batty, Rachel A

    2008-07-01

    Memory deficits have been reported in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. However, the precise impact of semantic memory deficits on word comprehension, particularly across grammatical categories, has not been adequately investigated in these disorders. Furthermore, previous studies examining semantic memory have predominantly been designed so that most healthy controls perform at ceiling, questioning the validity of observed differences between patient and control groups. A new word definition task examined word comprehension across grammatical categories, i.e. nouns, verbs and adjectives, and was designed to overcome the ceiling effect. It was administered to 32 schizophrenia patients, 28 bipolar disorder patients and 32 matched healthy controls. Schizophrenia patients had a global impairment on the task but bipolar patients were only impaired on a recognition memory component. Word comprehension, however, across grammatical categories was comparable across groups.

  9. Functional heterogeneity within the default network during semantic processing and speech production.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mohamed L Seghier

    2012-08-01

    Full Text Available This fMRI study investigated the functional heterogeneity of the core nodes of the default mode network (DMN during language processing. The core nodes of the DMN were defined as task-induced deactivations over multiple tasks in 94 healthy subjects. We used a factorial design that manipulated different tasks (semantic matching or speech production and stimuli (familiar words and objects or unfamiliar stimuli, alternating with periods of fixation/rest. Our findings revealed several consistent effects in the DMN, namely less deactivations in the left inferior parietal lobule during semantic than perceptual matching in parallel with greater deactivations during semantic matching in anterior subdivisions of the posterior cingulate cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This suggests that, when the brain is engaged in effortful semantic tasks, a part of the DMN in the left angular gyrus was less deactivated as five other nodes of the DMN were more deactivated. These five DMN areas, where deactivation was greater for semantic than perceptual matching, were further differentiated because deactivation was greater in (i posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex for speech production relative to semantic matching, (ii posterior precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex for perceptual processing relative to speech production and (iii right inferior parietal cortex for pictures of objects relative to written words during both naming and semantic decisions. Our results thus highlight that task difficulty alone cannot fully explain the functional variability in task-induced deactivations. Together these results emphasize that core nodes within the DMN are functionally heterogeneous and differentially sensitive to the type of language processing.

  10. Enabling task-based information prioritization via semantic web encodings

    Science.gov (United States)

    Michaelis, James R.

    2016-05-01

    Modern Soldiers rely upon accurate and actionable information technology to achieve mission objectives. While increasingly rich sensor networks for Areas of Operation (AO) can offer many directions for aiding Soldiers, limitations are imposed by current tactical edge systems on the rate that content can be transmitted. Furthermore, mission tasks will often require very specific sets of information which may easily be drowned out by other content sources. Prior research on Quality and Value of Information (QoI/VoI) has aimed to define ways to prioritize information objects based on their intrinsic attributes (QoI) and perceived value to a consumer (VoI). As part of this effort, established ranking approaches for obtaining Subject Matter Expert (SME) recommendations, such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) have been considered. However, limited work has been done to tie Soldier context - such as descriptions of their mission and tasks - back to intrinsic attributes of information objects. As a first step toward addressing the above challenges, this work introduces an ontology-backed approach - rooted in Semantic Web publication practices - for expressing both AHP decision hierarchies and corresponding SME feedback. Following a short discussion on related QoI/VoI research, an ontology-based data structure is introduced for supporting evaluation of Information Objects, using AHP rankings designed to facilitate information object prioritization. Consistent with alternate AHP approaches, prioritization in this approach is based on pairwise comparisons between Information Objects with respect to established criteria, as well as on pairwise comparison of the criteria to assess their relative importance. The paper concludes with a discussion of both ongoing and future work.

  11. Stress priming in picture naming: an SOA study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schiller, Niels O; Fikkert, Paula; Levelt, Clara C

    2004-01-01

    This study investigates whether or not the representation of lexical stress information can be primed during speech production. In four experiments, we attempted to prime the stress position of bisyllabic target nouns (picture names) having initial and final stress with auditory prime words having either the same or different stress as the target (e.g., WORtel-MOtor vs. koSTUUM-MOtor; capital letters indicate stressed syllables in prime-target pairs). Furthermore, half of the prime words were semantically related, the other half unrelated. Overall, picture names were not produced faster when the prime word had the same stress as the target than when the prime had different stress, i.e., there was no stress-priming effect in any experiment. This result would not be expected if stress were stored in the lexicon. However, targets with initial stress were responded to faster than final-stress targets. The reason for this effect was neither the quality of the pictures nor frequency of occurrence or voice-key characteristics. We hypothesize here that this stress effect is a genuine encoding effect, i.e., words with stress on the second syllable take longer to be encoded because their stress pattern is irregular with respect to the lexical distribution of bisyllabic stress patterns, even though it can be regular with respect to metrical stress rules in Dutch. The results of the experiments are discussed in the framework of models of phonological encoding.

  12. The Effect of Concurrent Semantic Categorization on Delayed Serial Recall

    Science.gov (United States)

    Acheson, Daniel J.; MacDonald, Maryellen C.; Postle, Bradley R.

    2011-01-01

    The influence of semantic processing on the serial ordering of items in short-term memory was explored using a novel dual-task paradigm. Participants engaged in 2 picture-judgment tasks while simultaneously performing delayed serial recall. List material varied in the presence of phonological overlap (Experiments 1 and 2) and in semantic content…

  13. Inhibitory control efficiency in a Piaget-like class-inclusion task in school-age children and adults: a developmental negative priming study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Borst, G; Poirel, N; Pineau, A; Cassotti, M; Houdé, O

    2013-07-01

    Most children under 7 years of age presented with 10 daisies and 2 roses fail to indicate that there are more flowers than daisies. Instead of the appropriate comparison of the relative numerosities of the superordinate class (flowers) to its subordinate class (daisies), they perform a direct perceptual comparison of the extensions of the 2 subordinate classes (daisies vs. roses). In our experiment, we investigated whether increasing efficiency in solving the Piagetian class-inclusion task is related to increasing efficiency in the ability to resist (inhibit) this direct comparison of the subordinate classes' extensions. Ten-year-old and young adult participants performed a computerized priming version of a Piaget-like class-inclusion task. The experimental design was such that the misleading perceptual strategy to inhibit on the prime (in which a superordinate class had to be compared with a subordinate class) became a congruent strategy to activate on the probe (in which the two subordinate classes' extensions were directly compared). We found a negative priming effect of 291 ms in children and 129 ms in adults. These results provide evidence for the first time (a) that adults still need to inhibit the comparison of the subordinate classes' extensions in class-inclusion tasks and (b) that the ability to inhibit this heuristic increases with age (resulting in a lower executive cost). Taken together, these findings provide additional support for the neo-Piagetian approach of cognitive development that suggests that the acquisition of increasingly complex knowledge is based on the ability to resist (inhibit) heuristics and previously acquired knowledge.

  14. Can False Memories Prime Problem Solutions?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Howe, Mark L.; Garner, Sarah R.; Dewhurst, Stephen A.; Ball, Linden J.

    2010-01-01

    Previous research has suggested that false memories can prime performance on related implicit and explicit memory tasks. The present research examined whether false memories can also be used to prime higher order cognitive processes, namely, insight-based problem solving. Participants were asked to solve a number of compound remote associate task…

  15. TRECVid Semantic Indexing of Video: A 6-year Retrospective

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Awad, G.; Snoek, C.G.M.; Smeaton, A.F.; Quénot, G.

    2016-01-01

    Semantic indexing, or assigning semantic tags to video samples, is a key component for content-based access to video documents and collections. The Semantic Indexing task has been run at TRECVid from 2010 to 2015 with the support of NIST and the Quaero project. As with the previous High-Level

  16. Semantic and episodic memory of music are subserved by distinct neural networks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Platel, Hervé; Baron, Jean-Claude; Desgranges, Béatrice; Bernard, Frédéric; Eustache, Francis

    2003-09-01

    Numerous functional imaging studies have shown that retrieval from semantic and episodic memory is subserved by distinct neural networks. However, these results were essentially obtained with verbal and visuospatial material. The aim of this work was to determine the neural substrates underlying the semantic and episodic components of music using familiar and nonfamiliar melodic tunes. To study musical semantic memory, we designed a task in which the instruction was to judge whether or not the musical extract was felt as "familiar." To study musical episodic memory, we constructed two delayed recognition tasks, one containing only familiar and the other only nonfamiliar items. For each recognition task, half of the extracts (targets) were presented in the prior semantic task. The episodic and semantic tasks were to be contrasted by a comparison to two perceptive control tasks and to one another. Cerebral blood flow was assessed by means of the oxygen-15-labeled water injection method, using high-resolution PET. Distinct patterns of activations were found. First, regarding the episodic memory condition, bilateral activations of the middle and superior frontal gyri and precuneus (more prominent on the right side) were observed. Second, the semantic memory condition disclosed extensive activations in the medial and orbital frontal cortex bilaterally, the left angular gyrus, and predominantly the left anterior part of the middle temporal gyri. The findings from this study are discussed in light of the available neuropsychological data obtained in brain-damaged subjects and functional neuroimaging studies.

  17. Rapid response learning of brand logo priming: Evidence that brand priming is not dominated by rapid response learning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Boehm, Stephan G; Smith, Ciaran; Muench, Niklas; Noble, Kirsty; Atherton, Catherine

    2017-08-31

    Repetition priming increases the accuracy and speed of responses to repeatedly processed stimuli. Repetition priming can result from two complementary sources: rapid response learning and facilitation within perceptual and conceptual networks. In conceptual classification tasks, rapid response learning dominates priming of object recognition, but it does not dominate priming of person recognition. This suggests that the relative engagement of network facilitation and rapid response learning depends on the stimulus domain. Here, we addressed the importance of the stimulus domain for rapid response learning by investigating priming in another domain, brands. In three experiments, participants performed conceptual decisions for brand logos. Strong priming was present, but it was not dominated by rapid response learning. These findings add further support to the importance of the stimulus domain for the relative importance of network facilitation and rapid response learning, and they indicate that brand priming is more similar to person recognition priming than object recognition priming, perhaps because priming of both brands and persons requires individuation.

  18. Affective priming of emotional pictures in parafoveal vision: left visual field advantage.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Calvo, Manuel G; Avero, Pedro

    2008-03-01

    This study investigated whether stimulus affective content can be extracted from visual scenes when these appear in parafoveal locations of the visual field and are foveally masked, and whether there is lateralization involved. Parafoveal prime pleasant or unpleasant scenes were presented for 150 msec 2.5 degrees away from fixation and were followed by a foveal probe scene that was either congruent or incongruent in emotional valence with the prime. Participants responded whether the probe was emotionally positive or negative. Affective priming was demonstrated by shorter response latencies for congruent than for incongruent prime-probe pairs. This effect occurred when the prime was presented in the left visual field at a 300-msec prime-probe stimulus onset asynchrony, even when the prime and the probe were different in physical appearance and semantic category. This result reveals that the affective significance of emotional stimuli can be assessed early through covert attention mechanisms, in the absence of overt eye fixations on the stimuli, and suggests that right-hemisphere dominance is involved.

  19. Syntactic Priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nicol, Janet L.

    1996-01-01

    Reviews the syntactic priming task, a paradigm involving the presentation of a phrasal or clausal context, followed by the presentation of a target item for lexical decision or naming. Notes that response times are faster for targets syntactically congruent with the preceding context than for incongruent targets. Outlines how to administer this…

  20. The effect of priming with a love concept on blood donation promise.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Charles-Sire, Virginie; Guéguen, Nicolas; Meineri, Sébastien; Martin, Angélique; Bullock, Andrea

    2014-02-01

    This field study on blood donor behavior tests the effectiveness of semantic priming on donor intention and commitment. Using face-to-face interactions, participants were primed with the concept of love and solicited to promise blood to the French National Blood Bank. Results showed a significant effect on willingness to donate blood and on donor commitment. The relatively simple and easily implemented technique used in this study could be of interest in improving performance of recruitment and retention campaigns. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  1. Semantic, phonologic, and verb fluency in Huntington's disease

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mariana Jardim Azambuja

    Full Text Available Abstract Verbal fluency tasks have been identified as important indicators of executive functioning impairment in patients with frontal lobe dysfunction. Although the usual evaluation of this ability considers phonologic and semantic criteria, there is some evidence that fluency of verbs would be more sensitive in disclosing frontostriatal physiopathology since frontal regions primarily mediate retrieval of verbs. Huntington's disease usually affects these circuitries. Objective: To compare three types of verbal fluency task in the assessment of frontal-striatal dysfunction in HD subjects. Methods: We studied 26 Huntington's disease subjects, divided into two subgroups: mild (11 and moderate (15 along with 26 normal volunteers matched for age, gender and schooling, for three types of verbal fluency: phonologic fluency (F-A-S, semantic fluency and fluency of verbs. Results: Huntington's disease subjects showed a significant reduction in the number of words correctly generated in the three tasks when compared to the normal group. Both controls and Huntington's disease subjects showed a similar pattern of decreasing task performance with the greatest number of words being generated by semantic elicitation followed by verbs and lastly phonologic criteria. We did not find greater production of verbs compared with F-A-S and semantic conditions. Moreover, the fluency of verbs distinguished only the moderate group from controls. Conclusion: Our results indicated that phonologic and semantic fluency can be used to evaluate executive functioning, proving more sensitive than verb fluency. However, it is important to point out that the diverse presentations of Huntington's disease means that an extended sample is necessary for more consistent analysis of this issue.

  2. Priming involuntary autobiographical memories in the lab.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Barzykowski, Krystian; Niedźwieńska, Agnieszka

    2018-02-01

    Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) are recollections of personal past that frequently and spontaneously occur in daily life. Initial studies by Mace (2005) showed that deliberately reminiscing about a certain lifetime period (e.g., high school) significantly increased the number of different IAMs from the same period in subsequent days, suggesting that priming may play a significant role in the retrieval of IAMs in everyday life. In the present study, we used a modified experimental paradigm, originally used by Schlagman and Kvavilashvili (2008), to study IAMs under well-controlled laboratory conditions. Participants completed a monotonous vigilance task twice and reported the occurrence of any spontaneous thoughts that were later classed as IAMs or other thoughts. Priming was manipulated by having experimental participants reminiscing about high school period between the two vigilance tasks and control participants playing simple games. Results showed that participants in the experimental group reported IAMs relating to high school period more frequently during the second vigilance task than those in the control group. In the experimental group, the number of high school memories was marginally higher in the second vigilance task compared to the first vigilance task with the medium effect size, but this within subjects effect was not significant in the control group. Finally, priming also enhanced the retrieval of more remote IAMs in the experimental group compared to the control group. These results suggest that priming may play a significant role in the activation and recall of IAMs and open up interesting avenues for future research.

  3. [An effect of semantic satiation in conceptual processing].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Takashi, Shimokido

    2007-12-01

    This study examined whether semantic satiation effects for a picture exemplar differ from a word exemplar. If massive repetition of the category name leads to an inhibition of conceptual processing, then semantic satiation effects would be found in both the word and picture exemplar conditions. However, if the repetition leads to an inhibition of lexical processing, then effects would be found for the word exemplar but not the picture exemplar. To examine these hypotheses, 48 college students were asked to judge whether a target pair of exemplars belonged to the same named category. The results showed that semantic satiation effects were found equally in both exemplar conditions. Moreover, the picture-superiority effect was intact regardless of the prime repetitions. The possibility was discussed that word and picture exemplars are integrated into an abstract and amodal conceptual unit; hence category judgment was affected by the satiation effect.

  4. Is semantic verbal fluency impairment explained by executive function deficits in schizophrenia?

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Arthur A. Berberian

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available Objective: To investigate if verbal fluency impairment in schizophrenia reflects executive function deficits or results from degraded semantic store or inefficient search and retrieval strategies. Method: Two groups were compared: 141 individuals with schizophrenia and 119 healthy age and education-matched controls. Both groups performed semantic and phonetic verbal fluency tasks. Performance was evaluated using three scores, based on 1 number of words generated; 2 number of clustered/related words; and 3 switching score. A fourth performance score based on the number of clusters was also measured. Results: SZ individuals produced fewer words than controls. After controlling for the total number of words produced, a difference was observed between the groups in the number of cluster-related words generated in the semantic task. In both groups, the number of words generated in the semantic task was higher than that generated in the phonemic task, although a significant group vs. fluency type interaction showed that subjects with schizophrenia had disproportionate semantic fluency impairment. Working memory was positively associated with increased production of words within clusters and inversely correlated with switching. Conclusion: Semantic fluency impairment may be attributed to an inability (resulting from reduced cognitive control to distinguish target signal from competing noise and to maintain cues for production of memory probes.

  5. Selective Short-Term Memory Deficits Arise from Impaired Domain-General Semantic Control Mechanisms

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hoffman, Paul; Jefferies, Elizabeth; Ehsan, Sheeba; Hopper, Samantha; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.

    2009-01-01

    Semantic short-term memory (STM) patients have a reduced ability to retain semantic information over brief delays but perform well on other semantic tasks; this pattern suggests damage to a dedicated buffer for semantic information. Alternatively, these difficulties may arise from mild disruption to domain-general semantic processes that have…

  6. Semantic and phonological coding in poor and normal readers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vellutino, F R; Scanlon, D M; Spearing, D

    1995-02-01

    Three studies were conducted evaluating semantic and phonological coding deficits as alternative explanations of reading disability. In the first study, poor and normal readers in second and sixth grade were compared on various tests evaluating semantic development as well as on tests evaluating rapid naming and pseudoword decoding as independent measures of phonological coding ability. In a second study, the same subjects were given verbal memory and visual-verbal learning tasks using high and low meaning words as verbal stimuli and Chinese ideographs as visual stimuli. On the semantic tasks, poor readers performed below the level of the normal readers only at the sixth grade level, but, on the rapid naming and pseudoword learning tasks, they performed below the normal readers at the second as well as at the sixth grade level. On both the verbal memory and visual-verbal learning tasks, performance in poor readers approximated that of normal readers when the word stimuli were high in meaning but not when they were low in meaning. These patterns were essentially replicated in a third study that used some of the same semantic and phonological measures used in the first experiment, and verbal memory and visual-verbal learning tasks that employed word lists and visual stimuli (novel alphabetic characters) that more closely approximated those used in learning to read. It was concluded that semantic coding deficits are an unlikely cause of reading difficulties in most poor readers at the beginning stages of reading skills acquisition, but accrue as a consequence of prolonged reading difficulties in older readers. It was also concluded that phonological coding deficits are a probable cause of reading difficulties in most poor readers.

  7. Comparison of the neural substrates mediating the semantic processing of Korean and English words using positron emission tomography

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Kim, Jea Jin; Kim, Myung Sun; Cho, Sang Soo; Kwon, Jun Soo; Lee, Jae Sung; Lee, Dong Soo; Chung, June Key; Lee, Myung Chul

    2001-01-01

    This study was performed to search the relatively specific brain regions related to the semantic processing of Korean and English words on the one hand and the regions common to both on the other. Regional cerebral blood flow associated with different semantic tasks was examined using ( 15 O)H 2 O positron emission tomography in 13 healthy volunteers. The tasks consisted of semantic tasks for Korean words, semantic tasks for English words and control tasks using simple pictures. The regions specific and common to each language were identified by the relevant subtraction analysis using statistical parametric mapping. Common to the semantic processing of both words, the activation site was observed in the fusiform gyrus, particularly the left side. In addition, activation of the left inferior temporal gyrus was found only in the semantic processing of English words. The regions specific to Korean words were observed in multiple areas, including the right primary auditory cortex; whereas the regions specific to English words were limited to the right posterior visual area. Internal phonological process is engaged in performing the visual semantic task for Korean words of the high proficiency, whereas visual scanning plays an important role in performing the task for English words of the low proficiency

  8. Modeling Views for Semantic Web Using eXtensible Semantic (XSemantic) Nets

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Rajugan, R.; Chang, E.; Feng, L.; Dillon, T.; meersman, R; Tari, Z; herrero, p; Méndez, G.; Cavedon, L.; Martin, D.; Hinze, A.; Buchanan, G.

    2005-01-01

    The emergence of Semantic Web (SW) and the related technologies promise to make the web a meaningful experience. Yet, high level modeling, design and querying techniques proves to be a challenging task for organizations that are hoping utilize the SW paradigm for their industrial applications, which

  9. The impact of depressed mood, working memory capacity, and priming on delay discounting.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Szuhany, Kristin L; MacKenzie, Danny; Otto, Michael W

    2018-09-01

    The impaired ability to delay rewards, delay discounting (DD), is associated with several problematic conditions in which impulsive decision-making derails long-term goals. Working memory (WM), the ability to actively store and manipulate information, is associated with DD. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of cognitive priming on DD and to identify moderation of this effect dependent on degree of WM capacity (WMC) and depressed mood. A WM task (n-back) was used as a cognitive prime before assessment of DD (Monetary Choice Questionnaire) and was compared to a similar prime from an inhibition task in a factorial design in 183 community participants. All participants completed a DD task and assessment of depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory-II). Priming effects were evaluated relative to WMC of participants. Higher WMC and lower depression scores were associated with greater relative preference for larger, delayed rewards. The effects of a WM prime were moderated by WMC; benefits of the prime were only evident for individuals with lower WMC. No effects were found for an alternative inhibition task. Limitations included depression scores mainly in subclinical range, use of hypothetical instead of real rewards in the DD task, and no examination of the time course of effects. This study provides support for the effectiveness of a brief WM prime in enhancing ability to delay rewards. Priming may be a useful adjunctive intervention for individuals with WM dysfunction or conditions in which impulsive decision-making may derail long-term goals. Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

  10. Deliberate Learning and Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language

    Science.gov (United States)

    Elgort, Irina

    2011-01-01

    This study investigates outcomes of deliberate learning on vocabulary acquisition in a second language (L2). Acquisition of 48 pseudowords was measured using the lexical decision task with visually presented stimuli. The experiments drew on form priming, masked repetition priming, and automatic semantic priming procedures. Data analyses revealed a…

  11. How "mere" is the mere ownership effect in memory? Evidence for semantic organization processes.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Englert, Julia; Wentura, Dirk

    2016-11-01

    Memory is better for items arbitrarily assigned to the self than for items assigned to another person (mere ownership effect, MOE). In a series of six experiments, we investigated the role of semantic processes for the MOE. Following successful replication, we investigated whether the MOE was contingent upon semantic processing: For meaningless stimuli, there was no MOE. Testing for a potential role of semantic elaboration using meaningful stimuli in an encoding task without verbal labels, we found evidence of spontaneous semantic processing irrespective of self- or other-assignment. When semantic organization was manipulated, the MOE vanished if a semantic classification task was added to the self/other assignment but persisted for a perceptual classification task. Furthermore, we found greater clustering of self-assigned than of other-assigned items in free recall. Taken together, these results suggest that the MOE could be based on the organizational principle of a "me" versus "not-me" categorization. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  12. Analysis of Semantic Networks using Complex Networks Concepts

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Ortiz-Arroyo, Daniel

    2013-01-01

    In this paper we perform a preliminary analysis of semantic networks to determine the most important terms that could be used to optimize a summarization task. In our experiments, we measure how the properties of a semantic network change, when the terms in the network are removed. Our preliminar...

  13. A prime a day keeps calories away: The effects of supraliminal priming on food consumption and the moderating role of gender and eating restraint.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Minas, Randall K; Poor, Morgan; Dennis, Alan R; Bartelt, Valerie L

    2016-10-01

    The link between intentions and action in weight control is weaker than previously thought, so recent research has called for further investigation of ways to improve weight control that bypass conscious intentions. Priming has been shown to have effects on individual behavior in a variety of contexts by influencing subconscious cognition. This paper investigates the effects of semantic priming using healthy body image, goal-oriented words on food consumption. The moderating role of both restrained eating and gender is investigated. 161 participants were involved in an experiment using a novel version of a scrambled sentence priming game. The outcome measure was the number of kilocalories consumed, examined using a between subjects ANCOVA with priming, gender, restrained eating index, self-reported BMI, and two interaction terms (primingxgender, and primingxrestrained eating index). There was no main effect of priming but there was an interaction of priming with gender. Females consumed significantly fewer kilocalories after being exposed to priming words related to a healthy body image (i.e. "slim", "fit,") compared to females receiving the neutral prime, with a medium effect size (d = 0.58). The body image prime did not significantly affect food intake for males, nor did it have a differential effect on restrained eaters. This study shows that priming can be an effective method for influencing females to reduce food intake, regardless of whether they are restrained or unrestrained eaters. Future studies could investigate whether different priming words related to a male's healthy body image goal (i.e. "buff," "muscles," etc.) would similarly reduce food intake for males. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

  14. Using semantic memory to boost 'episodic' recall in a case of developmental amnesia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Brandt, Karen R; Gardiner, John M; Vargha-Khadem, Faraneh; Baddeley, Alan D; Mishkin, Mortimer

    2006-07-17

    We report two experiments that investigated factors that might boost 'episodic' recall for Jon, a developmental amnesic whose episodic memory is gravely impaired but whose semantic memory seems relatively normal. Experiment 1 showed that Jon's recall improved following a semantic study task compared with a non-semantic study task, as well as following four repeated study trials compared with only one. Experiment 2 additionally revealed that Jon's recall improved after acting compared with reading action phrases at study, but only if the phrases were well integrated semantically. The results provide some support for the hypothesis that Jon's 'episodic' recall depends on the extent to which he is able to retrieve events using semantic memory.

  15. Modulation of Task Demands Suggests That Semantic Processing Interferes with the Formation of Episodic Associations

    Science.gov (United States)

    Long, Nicole M.; Kahana, Michael J.

    2017-01-01

    Although episodic and semantic memory share overlapping neural mechanisms, it remains unclear how our pre-existing semantic associations modulate the formation of new, episodic associations. When freely recalling recently studied words, people rely on both episodic and semantic associations, shown through temporal and semantic clustering of…

  16. Extracting semantic representations from word co-occurrence statistics: stop-lists, stemming, and SVD.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bullinaria, John A; Levy, Joseph P

    2012-09-01

    In a previous article, we presented a systematic computational study of the extraction of semantic representations from the word-word co-occurrence statistics of large text corpora. The conclusion was that semantic vectors of pointwise mutual information values from very small co-occurrence windows, together with a cosine distance measure, consistently resulted in the best representations across a range of psychologically relevant semantic tasks. This article extends that study by investigating the use of three further factors--namely, the application of stop-lists, word stemming, and dimensionality reduction using singular value decomposition (SVD)--that have been used to provide improved performance elsewhere. It also introduces an additional semantic task and explores the advantages of using a much larger corpus. This leads to the discovery and analysis of improved SVD-based methods for generating semantic representations (that provide new state-of-the-art performance on a standard TOEFL task) and the identification and discussion of problems and misleading results that can arise without a full systematic study.

  17. Semantic Categorization and Reading Skill across Dutch Primary Grades: Development Yes, Relationship No

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gijsel, Martine A. R.; Ormel, Ellen A.; Hermans, Daan; Verhoeven, L.; Bosman, Anna M. T.

    2011-01-01

    In the present study, the development of semantic categorization and its relationship with reading was investigated across Dutch primary grade students. Three Exemplar-level tasks (Experiment 1) and two Superordinate-level tasks (Experiment 2) with different types of distracters (phonological, semantic and perceptual) were administered to assess…

  18. Spatial and Semantic Processing between Audition and Vision: An Event-Related Potential Study

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Xiaoxi Chen

    2011-10-01

    Full Text Available Using a crossmodal priming paradigm, this study investigated how the brain bound the spatial and semantic features in multisensory processing. The visual stimuli (pictures of animals were presented after the auditory stimuli (sounds of animals, and the stimuli from different modalities may match spatially (or semantically or not. Participants were required to detect the head orientation of the visual target (an oddball paradigm. The event-related potentials (ERPs to the visual stimuli was enhanced by spatial attention (150–170 ms irrespectively of semantic information. The early crossmodal attention effect for the visual stimuli was more negative in the spatial-congruent condition than in the spatial-incongruent condition. By contrast, the later effects of spatial ERPs were significant only for the semantic- congruent condition (250–300 ms. These findings indicated that spatial attention modulated early visual processing, and semantic and spatial features were simultaneously used to orient attention and modulate later processing stages.

  19. How Chinese Semantics Capability Improves Interpretation in Visual Communication

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cheng, Chu-Yu; Ou, Yang-Kun; Kin, Ching-Lung

    2017-01-01

    A visual representation involves delivering messages through visually communicated images. The study assumed that semantic recognition can affect visual interpretation ability, and the result showed that students graduating from a general high school achieve satisfactory results in semantic recognition and image interpretation tasks than students…

  20. Training Of Manual Actions Improves Language Understanding of Semantically-Related Action Sentences

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Matteo eLocatelli

    2012-12-01

    Full Text Available Conceptual knowledge accessed by language may involve the re-activation of the associated primary sensory-motor processes. Whether these embodied representations are indeed constitutive to conceptual knowledge is hotly debated, particularly since direct evidence that sensory-motor expertise can improve conceptual processing is scarce.In this study, we sought for this crucial piece of evidence, by training naive healthy subjects to perform complex manual actions and by measuring, before and after training, their performance in a semantic language task. 19 participants engaged in 3 weeks of motor training. Each participant was trained in 3 complex manual actions (e.g. origami. Before and after the training period, each subject underwent a series of manual dexterity tests and a semantic language task. The latter consisted of a sentence-picture semantic congruency judgment task, with 6 target congruent sentence-picture pairs (semantically related to the trained manual actions, 6 non-target congruent pairs (semantically unrelated, and 12 filler incongruent pairs.Manual action training induced a significant improvement in all manual dexterity tests, demonstrating the successful acquisition of sensory-motor expertise. In the semantic language task, the reaction times to both target and non-target congruent sentence-image pairs decreased after action training, indicating a more efficient conceptual-semantic processing. Noteworthy, the reaction times for target pairs decreased more than those for non-target pairs, as indicated by the 2x2 interaction. These results were confirmed when controlling for the potential bias of increased frequency of use of target lexical items during manual training.The results of the present study suggest that sensory-motor expertise gained by training of specific manual actions can lead to an improvement of cognitive-linguistic skills related to the specific conceptual-semantic domain associated to the trained actions.

  1. Facial expression primes and implicit regulation of negative emotion.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yoon, HeungSik; Kim, Shin Ah; Kim, Sang Hee

    2015-06-17

    An individual's responses to emotional information are influenced not only by the emotional quality of the information, but also by the context in which the information is presented. We hypothesized that facial expressions of happiness and anger would serve as primes to modulate subjective and neural responses to subsequently presented negative information. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a functional MRI study in which the brains of healthy adults were scanned while they performed an emotion-rating task. During the task, participants viewed a series of negative and neutral photos, one at a time; each photo was presented after a picture showing a face expressing a happy, angry, or neutral emotion. Brain imaging results showed that compared with neutral primes, happy facial primes increased activation during negative emotion in the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex and the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which are typically implicated in conflict detection and implicit emotion control, respectively. Conversely, relative to neutral primes, angry primes activated the right middle temporal gyrus and the left supramarginal gyrus during the experience of negative emotion. Activity in the amygdala in response to negative emotion was marginally reduced after exposure to happy primes compared with angry primes. Relative to neutral primes, angry facial primes increased the subjectively experienced intensity of negative emotion. The current study results suggest that prior exposure to facial expressions of emotions modulates the subsequent experience of negative emotion by implicitly activating the emotion-regulation system.

  2. Self-construal priming affects speed of retrieval from short-term memory.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Justin A Macdonald

    Full Text Available We investigated the effects of collective or individual self-construal priming on recall in a short-term memory (STM task. We primed participants to either their individual or their collective self-construals or a neutral control condition. Participants then completed a STM retrieval task using either random or patterned digit strings. Findings revealed that priming an individual self-construal resulted in faster retrieval of information from STM for both stimulus types. These results indicate that individual self-accessibility improves retrieval speed of digits from STM, regardless of set configuration. More broadly, the present findings extend prior research by adding further evidence of the effects of self-construal priming on cognitive information processing.

  3. The priming of basic combinatory responses in MEG.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Blanco-Elorrieta, Esti; Ferreira, Victor S; Del Prato, Paul; Pylkkänen, Liina

    2018-01-01

    Priming has been a powerful tool for the study of human memory and especially the memory representations relevant for language. However, although it is well established that lexical access can be primed, we do not know exactly what types of computations can be primed above the word level. This work took a neurobiological approach and assessed the ways in which the complex representation of a minimal combinatory phrase, such as red boat, can be primed, as evidenced by the spatiotemporal profiles of magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals. Specifically, we built upon recent progress on the neural signatures of phrasal composition and tested whether the brain activities implicated for the basic combination of two words could be primed. In two experiments, MEG was recorded during a picture naming task where the prime trials were designed to replicate previously reported combinatory effects and the target trials to test whether those combinatory effects could be primed. The manipulation of the primes was successful in eliciting larger activity for adjective-noun combinations than single nouns in left anterior temporal and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, replicating prior MEG studies on parallel contrasts. Priming of similarly timed activity was observed during target trials in anterior temporal cortex, but only when the prime and target shared an adjective. No priming in temporal cortex was observed for single word repetition and two control tasks showed that the priming effect was not elicited if the prime pictures were simply viewed but not named. In sum, this work provides evidence that very basic combinatory operations can be primed, with the necessity for some lexical overlap between prime and target suggesting combinatory conceptual, as opposed to syntactic processing. Both our combinatory and priming effects were early, onsetting between 100 and 150ms after picture onset and thus are likely to reflect the very earliest planning stages of a combinatory message

  4. The semantic category-based grouping in the Multiple Identity Tracking task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wei, Liuqing; Zhang, Xuemin; Li, Zhen; Liu, Jingyao

    2018-01-01

    In the Multiple Identity Tracking (MIT) task, categorical distinctions between targets and distractors have been found to facilitate tracking (Wei, Zhang, Lyu, & Li in Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 589, 2016). The purpose of this study was to further investigate the reasons for the facilitation effect, through six experiments. The results of Experiments 1-3 excluded the potential explanations of visual distinctiveness, attentional distribution strategy, and a working memory mechanism, respectively. When objects' visual information was preserved and categorical information was removed, the facilitation effect disappeared, suggesting that the visual distinctiveness between targets and distractors was not the main reason for the facilitation effect. Moreover, the facilitation effect was not the result of strategically shifting the attentional distribution, because the targets received more attention than the distractors in all conditions. Additionally, the facilitation effect did not come about because the identities of targets were encoded and stored in visual working memory to assist in the recovery from tracking errors; when working memory was disturbed by the object identities changing during tracking, the facilitation effect still existed. Experiments 4 and 5 showed that observers grouped targets together and segregated them from distractors on the basis of their categorical information. By doing this, observers could largely avoid distractor interference with tracking and improve tracking performance. Finally, Experiment 6 indicated that category-based grouping is not an automatic, but a goal-directed and effortful, strategy. In summary, the present findings show that a semantic category-based target-grouping mechanism exists in the MIT task, which is likely to be the major reason for the tracking facilitation effect.

  5. Learning Semantic Segmentation with Diverse Supervision

    OpenAIRE

    Ye, Linwei; Liu, Zhi; Wang, Yang

    2018-01-01

    Models based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have significantly improved the performance of semantic segmentation. However, learning these models requires a large amount of training images with pixel-level labels, which are very costly and time-consuming to collect. In this paper, we propose a method for learning CNN-based semantic segmentation models from images with several types of annotations that are available for various computer vision tasks, including image-level labels fo...

  6. Priming motivation through unattended speech.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Radel, Rémi; Sarrazin, Philippe; Jehu, Marie; Pelletier, Luc

    2013-12-01

    This study examines whether motivation can be primed through unattended speech. Study 1 used a dichotic-listening paradigm and repeated strength measures. In comparison to the baseline condition, in which the unattended channel was only composed by neutral words, the presence of words related to high (low) intensity of motivation led participants to exert more (less) strength when squeezing a hand dynamometer. In a second study, a barely audible conversation was played while participants' attention was mobilized on a demanding task. Participants who were exposed to a conversation depicting intrinsic motivation performed better and persevered longer in a subsequent word-fragment completion task than those exposed to the same conversation made unintelligible. These findings suggest that motivation can be primed without attention. © 2013 The British Psychological Society.

  7. A Familiar Pattern? Semantic Memory Contributes to the Enhancement of Visuo-Spatial Memories

    Science.gov (United States)

    Riby, Leigh M.; Orme, Elizabeth

    2013-01-01

    In this study we quantify for the first time electrophysiological components associated with incorporating long-term semantic knowledge with visuo-spatial information using two variants of a traditional matrix patterns task. Results indicated that the matrix task with greater semantic content was associated with enhanced accuracy and RTs in a…

  8. Semantic word category processing in semantic dementia and posterior cortical atrophy.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shebani, Zubaida; Patterson, Karalyn; Nestor, Peter J; Diaz-de-Grenu, Lara Z; Dawson, Kate; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

    2017-08-01

    There is general agreement that perisylvian language cortex plays a major role in lexical and semantic processing; but the contribution of additional, more widespread, brain areas in the processing of different semantic word categories remains controversial. We investigated word processing in two groups of patients whose neurodegenerative diseases preferentially affect specific parts of the brain, to determine whether their performance would vary as a function of semantic categories proposed to recruit those brain regions. Cohorts with (i) Semantic Dementia (SD), who have anterior temporal-lobe atrophy, and (ii) Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA), who have predominantly parieto-occipital atrophy, performed a lexical decision test on words from five different lexico-semantic categories: colour (e.g., yellow), form (oval), number (seven), spatial prepositions (under) and function words (also). Sets of pseudo-word foils matched the target words in length and bi-/tri-gram frequency. Word-frequency was matched between the two visual word categories (colour and form) and across the three other categories (number, prepositions, and function words). Age-matched healthy individuals served as controls. Although broad word processing deficits were apparent in both patient groups, the deficit was strongest for colour words in SD and for spatial prepositions in PCA. The patterns of performance on the lexical decision task demonstrate (a) general lexicosemantic processing deficits in both groups, though more prominent in SD than in PCA, and (b) differential involvement of anterior-temporal and posterior-parietal cortex in the processing of specific semantic categories of words. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

  9. Speech-in-speech perception and executive function involvement.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Marcela Perrone-Bertolotti

    Full Text Available This present study investigated the link between speech-in-speech perception capacities and four executive function components: response suppression, inhibitory control, switching and working memory. We constructed a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm using a written target word and a spoken prime word, implemented in one of two concurrent auditory sentences (cocktail party situation. The prime and target were semantically related or unrelated. Participants had to perform a lexical decision task on visual target words and simultaneously listen to only one of two pronounced sentences. The attention of the participant was manipulated: The prime was in the pronounced sentence listened to by the participant or in the ignored one. In addition, we evaluate the executive function abilities of participants (switching cost, inhibitory-control cost and response-suppression cost and their working memory span. Correlation analyses were performed between the executive and priming measurements. Our results showed a significant interaction effect between attention and semantic priming. We observed a significant priming effect in the attended but not in the ignored condition. Only priming effects obtained in the ignored condition were significantly correlated with some of the executive measurements. However, no correlation between priming effects and working memory capacity was found. Overall, these results confirm, first, the role of attention for semantic priming effect and, second, the implication of executive functions in speech-in-noise understanding capacities.

  10. Segmentation cues in conversational speech: Robust semantics and fragile phonotactics

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Laurence eWhite

    2012-10-01

    Full Text Available Multiple cues influence listeners’ segmentation of connected speech into words, but most previous studies have used stimuli elicited in careful readings rather than natural conversation. Discerning word boundaries in conversational speech may differ from the laboratory setting. In particular, a speaker’s articulatory effort – hyperarticulation vs hypoarticulation (H&H – may vary according to communicative demands, suggesting a compensatory relationship whereby acoustic-phonetic cues are attenuated when other information sources strongly guide segmentation. We examined how listeners’ interpretation of segmentation cues is affected by speech style (spontaneous conversation vs read, using cross-modal identity priming. To elicit spontaneous stimuli, we used a map task in which speakers discussed routes around stylised landmarks. These landmarks were two-word phrases in which the strength of potential segmentation cues – semantic likelihood and cross-boundary diphone phonotactics – was systematically varied. Landmark-carrying utterances were transcribed and later re-recorded as read speech.Independent of speech style, we found an interaction between cue valence (favourable/unfavourable and cue type (phonotactics/semantics. Thus, there was an effect of semantic plausibility, but no effect of cross-boundary phonotactics, indicating that the importance of phonotactic segmentation may have been overstated in studies where lexical information was artificially suppressed. These patterns were unaffected by whether the stimuli were elicited in a spontaneous or read context, even though the difference in speech styles was evident in a main effect. Durational analyses suggested speaker-driven cue trade-offs congruent with an H&H account, but these modulations did not impact on listener behaviour. We conclude that previous research exploiting read speech is reliable in indicating the primacy of lexically-based cues in the segmentation of natural

  11. Hippocampal activation during episodic and semantic memory retrieval: comparing category production and category cued recall.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ryan, Lee; Cox, Christine; Hayes, Scott M; Nadel, Lynn

    2008-01-01

    Whether or not the hippocampus participates in semantic memory retrieval has been the focus of much debate in the literature. However, few neuroimaging studies have directly compared hippocampal activation during semantic and episodic retrieval tasks that are well matched in all respects other than the source of the retrieved information. In Experiment 1, we compared hippocampal fMRI activation during a classic semantic memory task, category production, and an episodic version of the same task, category cued recall. Left hippocampal activation was observed in both episodic and semantic conditions, although other regions of the brain clearly distinguished the two tasks. Interestingly, participants reported using retrieval strategies during the semantic retrieval task that relied on autobiographical and spatial information; for example, visualizing themselves in their kitchen while producing items for the category kitchen utensils. In Experiment 2, we considered whether the use of these spatial and autobiographical retrieval strategies could have accounted for the hippocampal activation observed in Experiment 1. Categories were presented that elicited one of three retrieval strategy types, autobiographical and spatial, autobiographical and nonspatial, and neither autobiographical nor spatial. Once again, similar hippocampal activation was observed for all three category types, regardless of the inclusion of spatial or autobiographical content. We conclude that the distinction between semantic and episodic memory is more complex than classic memory models suggest.

  12. Instant PrimeFaces starter

    CERN Document Server

    Hlavats, Ian

    2013-01-01

    Get to grips with a new technology, understand what it is and what it can do for you, and then get to work with the most important features and tasks. Instant Primefaces Starter is a fast-paced, introductory guide designed to give you all the information you need to start using Primfaces, instantly.Instant PrimeFaces Starter is great for developers looking to get started quickly with PrimeFaces. It's assumed that you have some JSF experience already, as well as familiarity with other Java technologies such as CDI and JPA and an understanding of MVC principles, object-relational mapping (ORM),

  13. Attention and implicit memory: priming-induced benefits and costs have distinct attentional requirements.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Keane, Margaret M; Cruz, Matt E; Verfaellie, Mieke

    2015-02-01

    Attention at encoding plays a critical and ubiquitous role in explicit memory performance, but its role in implicit memory performance (i.e., priming) is more variable: some, but not all, priming effects are reduced by division of attention at encoding. A wealth of empirical and theoretical work has aimed to define the critical features of priming effects that do or do not require attention at encoding. This work, however, has focused exclusively on priming effects that are beneficial in nature (wherein performance is enhanced by prior exposure to task stimuli), and has overlooked priming effects that are costly in nature (wherein performance is harmed by prior exposure to task stimuli). The present study takes up this question by examining the effect of divided attention on priming-induced costs and benefits in a speeded picture-naming task. Experiment 1 shows that the costs, but not the benefits, are eliminated by division of attention at encoding. Experiment 2 shows that the costs (as well as the benefits) in this task are intact in amnesic participants, demonstrating that the elimination of the cost in the divided attention condition in Experiment 1 was not an artifact of the reduced availability of explicit memory in that condition. We suggest that the differential role of attention in priming-induced performance costs and benefits is linked to differences in response competition associated with these effects. This interpretation situates the present findings within a theoretical framework that has been applied to a broad range of facilitatory priming effects.

  14. Attention and Implicit Memory: Priming-Induced Benefits and Costs Have Distinct Attentional Requirements

    Science.gov (United States)

    Keane, Margaret M.; Cruz, Matt E.; Verfaellie, Mieke

    2014-01-01

    Attention at encoding plays a critical and ubiquitous role in explicit memory performance, but its role in implicit memory performance (i.e., priming) is more variable: Some, but not all, priming effects are reduced by division of attention at encoding. A wealth of empirical and theoretical work has aimed to define the critical features of priming effects that do or do not require attention at encoding. This work, however, has focused exclusively on priming effects that are beneficial in nature (wherein performance is enhanced by prior exposure to task stimuli), and has overlooked priming effects that are costly in nature (wherein performance is harmed by prior exposure to task stimuli). The present study takes up this question by examining the effect of divided attention on priming-induced costs and benefits in a speeded picture-naming task. Experiment 1 shows that the costs, but not the benefits, are eliminated by division of attention at encoding. Experiment 2 shows that the costs (as well as the benefits) in this task are intact in amnesic participants, demonstrating that the elimination of the cost in the divided attention condition in Experiment 1 was not an artifact of the reduced availability of explicit memory in that condition. We suggest that the differential role of attention in priming-induced performance costs and benefits is linked to differences in response competition associated with these effects. This interpretation situates the present findings within a theoretical framework that has been applied to a broad range of facilitatory priming effects. PMID:25257650

  15. Semantic relations and compound transparency: A regression study in CARIN theory

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Pham Hien

    2013-01-01

    Full Text Available According to the CARIN theory of Gagné and Shoben (1997, conceptual relations play an important role in compound interpretation. This study develops three measures gauging the role of conceptual relations, and pits these measures against measures based on latent semantic analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997. The CARIN measures successfully predict response latencies in a familiarity categorization task, in a semantic transparency task, and in visual lexical decision. Of the measures based on latent semantic analysis, only a measure orthogonal to the conceptual relations, which instead gauges the extent to which the concepts for the compound’s head and the compound itself are discriminated, also reached significance. Results further indicate that in tasks requiring careful assessment of the meaning of the compound, general knowledge of conceptual relations plays a central role, whereas in the lexical decision task, attention shifts to co-activated meanings and the specifics of the conceptual relations realized in the compound’s modifier family.

  16. When emotional prosody and semantics dance cheek to cheek: ERP evidence.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kotz, Sonja A; Paulmann, Silke

    2007-06-02

    To communicate emotionally entails that a listener understands a verbal message but also the emotional prosody going along with it. So far the time course and interaction of these emotional 'channels' is still poorly understood. The current set of event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments investigated both the interactive time course of emotional prosody with semantics and of emotional prosody independent of emotional semantics using a cross-splicing method. In a probe verification task (Experiment 1) prosodic expectancy violations elicited a positivity, while a combined prosodic-semantic expectancy violation elicited a negativity. Comparable ERP results were obtained in an emotional prosodic categorization task (Experiment 2). The present data support different ERP responses with distinct time courses and topographies elicited as a function of prosodic expectancy and combined prosodic-semantic expectancy during emotional prosodic processing and combined emotional prosody/emotional semantic processing. These differences suggest that the interaction of more than one emotional channel facilitates subtle transitions in an emotional sentence context.

  17. Interaction between High-Level and Low-Level Image Analysis for Semantic Video Object Extraction

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Andrea Cavallaro

    2004-06-01

    Full Text Available The task of extracting a semantic video object is split into two subproblems, namely, object segmentation and region segmentation. Object segmentation relies on a priori assumptions, whereas region segmentation is data-driven and can be solved in an automatic manner. These two subproblems are not mutually independent, and they can benefit from interactions with each other. In this paper, a framework for such interaction is formulated. This representation scheme based on region segmentation and semantic segmentation is compatible with the view that image analysis and scene understanding problems can be decomposed into low-level and high-level tasks. Low-level tasks pertain to region-oriented processing, whereas the high-level tasks are closely related to object-level processing. This approach emulates the human visual system: what one “sees” in a scene depends on the scene itself (region segmentation as well as on the cognitive task (semantic segmentation at hand. The higher-level segmentation results in a partition corresponding to semantic video objects. Semantic video objects do not usually have invariant physical properties and the definition depends on the application. Hence, the definition incorporates complex domain-specific knowledge and is not easy to generalize. For the specific implementation used in this paper, motion is used as a clue to semantic information. In this framework, an automatic algorithm is presented for computing the semantic partition based on color change detection. The change detection strategy is designed to be immune to the sensor noise and local illumination variations. The lower-level segmentation identifies the partition corresponding to perceptually uniform regions. These regions are derived by clustering in an N-dimensional feature space, composed of static as well as dynamic image attributes. We propose an interaction mechanism between the semantic and the region partitions which allows to

  18. A semantic perspective on query log analysis

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Hofmann, K.; de Rijke, M.; Huurnink, B.; Meij, E.

    2009-01-01

    We present our views on the CLEF log file analysis task. We argue for a task definition that focuses on the semantic enrichment of query logs. In addition, we discuss how additional information about the context in which queries are being made could further our understanding of users’ information

  19. Semantic, syntactic, and phonological processing of written words in adult developmental dyslexic readers: an event-related brain potential study

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Johannes Sönke

    2007-07-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background The present study used event-related brain potentials to investigate semantic, phonological and syntactic processes in adult German dyslexic and normal readers in a word reading task. Pairs of German words were presented one word at a time. Subjects had to perform a semantic judgment task (house – window; are they semantically related?, a rhyme judgment task (house – mouse; do they rhyme? and a gender judgment task (das – Haus [the – house]; is the gender correct? [in German, house has a neutral gender: das Haus]. Results Normal readers responded faster compared to dyslexic readers in all three tasks. Onset latencies of the N400 component were delayed in dyslexic readers in the rhyme judgment and in the gender judgment task, but not in the semantic judgment task. N400 and the anterior negativity peak amplitudes did not differ between the two groups. However, the N400 persisted longer in the dyslexic group in the rhyme judgment and in the semantic judgment tasks. Conclusion These findings indicate that dyslexics are phonologically impaired (delayed N400 in the rhyme judgment task but that they also have difficulties in other, non-phonological aspects of reading (longer response times, longer persistence of the N400. Specifically, semantic and syntactic integration seem to require more effort for dyslexic readers and take longer irrespective of the reading task that has to be performed.

  20. Multimodal Sensor-Based Semantic 3D Mapping for a Large-Scale Environment

    OpenAIRE

    Jeong, Jongmin; Yoon, Tae Sung; Park, Jin Bae

    2018-01-01

    Semantic 3D mapping is one of the most important fields in robotics, and has been used in many applications, such as robot navigation, surveillance, and virtual reality. In general, semantic 3D mapping is mainly composed of 3D reconstruction and semantic segmentation. As these technologies evolve, there has been great progress in semantic 3D mapping in recent years. Furthermore, the number of robotic applications requiring semantic information in 3D mapping to perform high-level tasks has inc...

  1. Independent and additive repetition priming of motion direction and color in visual search.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kristjánsson, Arni

    2009-03-01

    Priming of visual search for Gabor patch stimuli, varying in color and local drift direction, was investigated. The task relevance of each feature varied between the different experimental conditions compared. When the target defining dimension was color, a large effect of color repetition was seen as well as a smaller effect of the repetition of motion direction. The opposite priming pattern was seen when motion direction defined the target--the effect of motion direction repetition was this time larger than for color repetition. Finally, when neither was task relevant, and the target defining dimension was the spatial frequency of the Gabor patch, priming was seen for repetition of both color and motion direction, but the effects were smaller than in the previous two conditions. These results show that features do not necessarily have to be task relevant for priming to occur. There is little interaction between priming following repetition of color and motion, these two features show independent and additive priming effects, most likely reflecting that the two features are processed at separate processing sites in the nervous system, consistent with previous findings from neuropsychology & neurophysiology. The implications of the findings for theoretical accounts of priming in visual search are discussed.

  2. How visual working memory contents influence priming of visual attention.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Carlisle, Nancy B; Kristjánsson, Árni

    2017-04-12

    Recent evidence shows that when the contents of visual working memory overlap with targets and distractors in a pop-out search task, intertrial priming is inhibited (Kristjánsson, Sævarsson & Driver, Psychon Bull Rev 20(3):514-521, 2013, Experiment 2, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review). This may reflect an interesting interaction between implicit short-term memory-thought to underlie intertrial priming-and explicit visual working memory. Evidence from a non-pop-out search task suggests that it may specifically be holding distractors in visual working memory that disrupts intertrial priming (Cunningham & Egeth, Psychol Sci 27(4):476-485, 2016, Experiment 2, Psychological Science). We examined whether the inhibition of priming depends on whether feature values in visual working memory overlap with targets or distractors in the pop-out search, and we found that the inhibition of priming resulted from holding distractors in visual working memory. These results are consistent with separate mechanisms of target and distractor effects in intertrial priming, and support the notion that the impact of implicit short-term memory and explicit visual working memory can interact when each provides conflicting attentional signals.

  3. Effects of psychological priming, video, and music on anaerobic exercise performance.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Loizou, G; Karageorghis, C I

    2015-12-01

    Peak performance videos accompanied by music can help athletes to optimize their pre-competition mindset and are often used. Priming techniques can be incorporated into such videos to influence athletes' motivational state. There has been limited empirical work investigating the combined effects of such stimuli on anaerobic performance. The present study examined the psychological and psychophysiological effects of video, music, and priming when used as a pre-performance intervention for an anaerobic endurance task. Psychological measures included the main axes of the circumplex model of affect and liking scores taken pre-task, and the Exercise-induced Feeling Inventory, which was administered post-task. Physiological measures comprised heart rate variability and heart rate recorded pre-task. Fifteen males (age = 26.3 ± 2.8 years) were exposed to four conditions prior to performing the Wingate Anaerobic Test: music-only, video and music, video with music and motivational primes, and a no-video/no-music control. Results indicate that the combined video, music, and primes condition was the most effective in terms of influencing participants' pre-task affect and subsequent anaerobic performance; this was followed by the music-only condition. The findings indicate the utility of such stimuli as a pre-performance technique to enhance athletes' or exercisers' psychological states. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  4. Evidence for the contribution of a threshold retrieval process to semantic memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kempnich, Maria; Urquhart, Josephine A; O'Connor, Akira R; Moulin, Chris J A

    2017-10-01

    It is widely held that episodic retrieval can recruit two processes: a threshold context retrieval process (recollection) and a continuous signal strength process (familiarity). Conversely the processes recruited during semantic retrieval are less well specified. We developed a semantic task analogous to single-item episodic recognition to interrogate semantic recognition receiver-operating characteristics (ROCs) for a marker of a threshold retrieval process. We fitted observed ROC points to three signal detection models: two models typically used in episodic recognition (unequal variance and dual-process signal detection models) and a novel dual-process recollect-to-reject (DP-RR) signal detection model that allows a threshold recollection process to aid both target identification and lure rejection. Given the nature of most semantic questions, we anticipated the DP-RR model would best fit the semantic task data. Experiment 1 (506 participants) provided evidence for a threshold retrieval process in semantic memory, with overall best fits to the DP-RR model. Experiment 2 (316 participants) found within-subjects estimates of episodic and semantic threshold retrieval to be uncorrelated. Our findings add weight to the proposal that semantic and episodic memory are served by similar dual-process retrieval systems, though the relationship between the two threshold processes needs to be more fully elucidated.

  5. Connecting long distance: semantic distance in analogical reasoning modulates frontopolar cortex activity.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Green, Adam E; Kraemer, David J M; Fugelsang, Jonathan A; Gray, Jeremy R; Dunbar, Kevin N

    2010-01-01

    Solving problems often requires seeing new connections between concepts or events that seemed unrelated at first. Innovative solutions of this kind depend on analogical reasoning, a relational reasoning process that involves mapping similarities between concepts. Brain-based evidence has implicated the frontal pole of the brain as important for analogical mapping. Separately, cognitive research has identified semantic distance as a key characteristic of the kind of analogical mapping that can support innovation (i.e., identifying similarities across greater semantic distance reveals connections that support more innovative solutions and models). However, the neural substrates of semantically distant analogical mapping are not well understood. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity during an analogical reasoning task, in which we parametrically varied the semantic distance between the items in the analogies. Semantic distance was derived quantitatively from latent semantic analysis. Across 23 participants, activity in an a priori region of interest (ROI) in left frontopolar cortex covaried parametrically with increasing semantic distance, even after removing effects of task difficulty. This ROI was centered on a functional peak that we previously associated with analogical mapping. To our knowledge, these data represent a first empirical characterization of how the brain mediates semantically distant analogical mapping.

  6. Semantic Interference in Immediate and Delayed Naming and Reading: Attention and Task Decisions

    Science.gov (United States)

    Piai, Vitoria; Roelofs, Ardi; Schriefers, Herbert

    2011-01-01

    Disagreement exists about whether lexical selection in word production is a competitive process. Competition predicts semantic interference from distractor words in immediate but not in delayed picture naming. In contrast, Janssen, Schirm, Mahon, and Caramazza (2008) obtained semantic interference in delayed picture naming when participants had to…

  7. The facilitative effects of glucose ingestion on memory retrieval in younger and older adults: is task difficulty or task domain critical?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Riby, Leigh M; McMurtrie, Hazel; Smallwood, Jonathan; Ballantyne, Carrie; Meikle, Andrew; Smith, Emily

    2006-02-01

    The ingestion of a glucose-containing drink has been shown to improve cognitive performance, particularly memory functioning. However, it remains unclear as to the extent to which task domain and task difficulty moderate the glucose enhancement effect. The aim of this research was to determine whether boosts in performance are restricted to particular classes of memory (episodic v. semantic) or to tasks of considerable cognitive load. A repeated measures (25 g glucose v. saccharin), counterbalanced, double-blind design was used with younger and older adults. Participants performed a battery of episodic (e.g. paired associate learning) and semantic memory (e.g. category verification) tasks under low and high cognitive load. Electrophysiological measures (heart rate and galvanic skin response) of arousal and mental effort were also gathered. The results indicated that whilst glucose appeared to aid episodic remembering, cognitive load did not exaggerate the facilitative effect. For semantic memory, there was little evidence to suggest that glucose can boost semantic memory retrieval even when the load was manipulated. One exception was that glucose facilitated performance during the difficult category fluency task. Regardless, the present findings are consistent with the domain-specific account in which glucose acts primarily on the hippocampal region, which is known to support episodic memory. The possible contribution of the hippocampus in semantic memory processing is also discussed.

  8. Exploring the role of the posterior middle temporal gyrus in semantic cognition: Integration of anterior temporal lobe with executive processes.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Davey, James; Thompson, Hannah E; Hallam, Glyn; Karapanagiotidis, Theodoros; Murphy, Charlotte; De Caso, Irene; Krieger-Redwood, Katya; Bernhardt, Boris C; Smallwood, Jonathan; Jefferies, Elizabeth

    2016-08-15

    Making sense of the world around us depends upon selectively retrieving information relevant to our current goal or context. However, it is unclear whether selective semantic retrieval relies exclusively on general control mechanisms recruited in demanding non-semantic tasks, or instead on systems specialised for the control of meaning. One hypothesis is that the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) is important in the controlled retrieval of semantic (not non-semantic) information; however this view remains controversial since a parallel literature links this site to event and relational semantics. In a functional neuroimaging study, we demonstrated that an area of pMTG implicated in semantic control by a recent meta-analysis was activated in a conjunction of (i) semantic association over size judgements and (ii) action over colour feature matching. Under these circumstances the same region showed functional coupling with the inferior frontal gyrus - another crucial site for semantic control. Structural and functional connectivity analyses demonstrated that this site is at the nexus of networks recruited in automatic semantic processing (the default mode network) and executively demanding tasks (the multiple-demand network). Moreover, in both task and task-free contexts, pMTG exhibited functional properties that were more similar to ventral parts of inferior frontal cortex, implicated in controlled semantic retrieval, than more dorsal inferior frontal sulcus, implicated in domain-general control. Finally, the pMTG region was functionally correlated at rest with other regions implicated in control-demanding semantic tasks, including inferior frontal gyrus and intraparietal sulcus. We suggest that pMTG may play a crucial role within a large-scale network that allows the integration of automatic retrieval in the default mode network with executively-demanding goal-oriented cognition, and that this could support our ability to understand actions and non

  9. Lexical-semantic knowledge about food in patients with different types of dementia

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Raffaella Ida Rumiati

    2014-04-01

    Full Text Available While many theories agree that the conceptual knowledge is organized in categories, there is less agreement on the underlying organizational principle (e.g. Warrington & Shallice, 1984, Caramazza & Shelton, 1998; Capitani et al., 2003. Previous neuropsychological studies on semantic categories failed to clearly characterize the status of food as a category as they did not carefully distinguish between natural food and transformed food. Exploring how natural food and transformed food items are processed in patients suffering from primary dementia can allow us to test the theories of how semantic knowledge is organized in the brain. Thirty patients and 15 healthy controls matched for age and education took part in the study . Thirteen patients received a presumptive diagnosis of fronto-temporal dementia (FTD, 3 patients of Semantic Dementia (SD, and 14 of Alzheimer Dementia (AD. All participants performed 3 tasks tapping lexical-semantic knowledge about food and non-food items: confrontation naming (Task 1, categorization (Task 2, and word-to-picture matching (Task 3. Moreover, half food items were natural (e.g., apple and half transformed (e.g. grana cheese, while non-food items were half non edible natural items (e.g., plant and half kitchen implements. The results showed that, overall, patients performed poorer than controls on Tasks 1 and 3, with FTD-SD patients being more impaired than AD patients. When we compared performance on food versus non-food items, we observed that patients performed better on naming food than non-food items (Task 1. Specifically, FTD-SD patients displayed a significant difference between food and non-food items, while AD patients showed no difference. On Task 3 the same pattern was obtained. In addition, we observed that, across tasks, transformed food was processed better than natural food. These findings suggest that lexical-semantic processes are more prone to degradation in patients FTD-SD than in AD patients

  10. Emotion-Specific Priming: Congruence Effects on Affect and Recognition across Negative Emotions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hansen, Christine H.; Shantz, Cynthia A.

    1995-01-01

    Demonstrated the emotion-specific priming effects of negatively valenced emotions (anger, sadness, and fear) in a divided attention task. Results indicated that a negative emotion displayed by a target that matched the emotion induced by a priming manipulation was significantly stronger than an incongruous priming manipulation and displayed…

  11. Accounting for sequential trial effects in the flanker task: conflict adaptation or associative priming?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nieuwenhuis, Sander; Stins, John F; Posthuma, Danielle; Polderman, Tinca J C; Boomsma, Dorret I; de Geus, Eco J

    2006-09-01

    The conflict-control loop theory proposes that the detection of conflict in information processing triggers an increase in cognitive control, resulting in improved performance on the subsequent trial. This theory seems consistent with the robust finding that conflict susceptibility is reduced following correct trials associated with high conflict: the conflict adaptation effect. However, despite providing favorable conditions for eliciting and detecting conflict-triggered performance adjustments, none of the five experiments reported here provide unequivocal evidence of such adjustments. Instead, the results corroborate and extend earlier findings by demonstrating that the conflict adaptation effect, at least in the flanker task, is only present for a specific subset of trial sequences that is characterized by a response repetition. This pattern of results provides strong evidence that the conflict adaptation effect reflects associative stimulus-response priming instead of conflict-driven adaptations in cognitive control.

  12. A dual contribution to the involuntary semantic processing of unexpected spoken words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Parmentier, Fabrice B R; Turner, Jacqueline; Perez, Laura

    2014-02-01

    Sounds are a major cause of distraction. Unexpected to-be-ignored auditory stimuli presented in the context of an otherwise repetitive acoustic background ineluctably break through selective attention and distract people from an unrelated visual task (deviance distraction). This involuntary capture of attention by deviant sounds has been hypothesized to trigger their semantic appraisal and, in some circumstances, interfere with ongoing performance, but it remains unclear how such processing compares with the automatic processing of distractors in classic interference tasks (e.g., Stroop, flanker, Simon tasks). Using a cross-modal oddball task, we assessed the involuntary semantic processing of deviant sounds in the presence and absence of deviance distraction. The results revealed that some involuntary semantic analysis of spoken distractors occurs in the absence of deviance distraction but that this processing is significantly greater in its presence. We conclude that the automatic processing of spoken distractors reflects 2 contributions, one that is contingent upon deviance distraction and one that is independent from it.

  13. Hippocampal activation during retrieval of spatial context from episodic and semantic memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hoscheidt, Siobhan M; Nadel, Lynn; Payne, Jessica; Ryan, Lee

    2010-10-15

    The hippocampus, a region implicated in the processing of spatial information and episodic memory, is central to the debate concerning the relationship between episodic and semantic memory. Studies of medial temporal lobe amnesic patients provide evidence that the hippocampus is critical for the retrieval of episodic but not semantic memory. On the other hand, recent neuroimaging studies of intact individuals report hippocampal activation during retrieval of both autobiographical memories and semantic information that includes historical facts, famous faces, and categorical information, suggesting that episodic and semantic memory may engage the hippocampus during memory retrieval in similar ways. Few studies have matched episodic and semantic tasks for the degree to which they include spatial content, even though spatial content may be what drives hippocampal activation during semantic retrieval. To examine this issue, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in which retrieval of spatial and nonspatial information was compared during an episodic and semantic recognition task. Results show that the hippocampus (1) participates preferentially in the retrieval of episodic memories; (2) is also engaged by retrieval of semantic memories, particularly those that include spatial information. These data suggest that sharp dissociations between episodic and semantic memory may be overly simplistic and that the hippocampus plays a role in the retrieval of spatial content whether drawn from a memory of one's own life experiences or real-world semantic knowledge. Published by Elsevier B.V.

  14. Are Judgments of Semantic Relatedness Systematically Impaired in Alzheimer's Disease?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hornberger, M.; Bell, B.; Graham, K. S.; Rogers, T. T.

    2009-01-01

    We employed a triadic comparison task in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy controls to contrast (a) multidimensional scaling (MDS) and accuracy-based assessments of semantic memory, and (b) degraded-store versus degraded-access accounts of semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Similar to other studies using triadic…

  15. Investigating the possibility of a syntactic impairment in the semantic variant of PPA using a constrained production task: Preliminary findings

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jennifer Cupit

    2015-04-01

    Full Text Available In the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA, syntactic skills are generally thought to be preserved, while in the non-fluent variant (nfvPPA syntactic impairment is a core diagnostic feature (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011. There are, however, some indications in the literature that syntactic processing may not be entirely normal in svPPA. Most studies of syntactic production in svPPA have used unconstrained tasks and have found no syntactic impairment (e.g., Bird et al., 2000; Kave et al., 2007. In the two published studies that have found a syntactic impairment in svPPA, one used a constrained task (Benedet et al., 2006, and the other (Meteyard & Patterson, 2009 did not. However, the authors of the latter article suggested that the observed syntactic errors were subtle. They also suggested that a syntactic impairment in svPPA might not be observed in spontaneous language samples due to an overreliance on simpler structures. In the current study, we used a constrained sentence production task to compare the syntactic abilities of individuals with nfvPPA, svPPA and healthy controls longitudinally, to investigate the existence of a syntactic impairment in the different PPA variants. We predicted that by using a constrained task we would observe a syntactic impairment in both variants of PPA. We tested 18 participants with nfvPPA, 13 with svPPA and 23 control participants. They were tested up to three separate times, with approximately one year between sessions. Groups were matched on age and years of education. The patient groups were matched on Mini Mental State Examination score (Folstein, Folstein & McHugh, 1975 and estimated time post onset of initial symptoms, but the nfvPPA group scored higher than the svPPA group on the Boston Naming Test (Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 2001. We used the sentence production task from Caplan and Hanna (1998 to elicit active, passive, dative and dative-passive sentences. A mixed ANOVA (Group X

  16. Effects of Iconicity and Semantic Relatedness on Lexical Access in American Sign Language

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bosworth, Rain G.; Emmorey, Karen

    2010-01-01

    Iconicity is a property that pervades the lexicon of many sign languages, including American Sign Language (ASL). Iconic signs exhibit a motivated, nonarbitrary mapping between the form of the sign and its meaning. We investigated whether iconicity enhances semantic priming effects for ASL and whether iconic signs are recognized more quickly than…

  17. Conceptual representation of verbs in bilinguals: semantic field effects and a second-language performance paradox.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Segalowitz, Norman; de Almeida, Roberto G

    2002-01-01

    It is well known that bilinguals perform better in their first language (L1) than in their second lanaguage (L2) in a wide range of linguistic tasks. In recent studies, however, the authors have found that bilingual participants can demonstrate faster response times to L1 stimuli than to L2 stimuli in one classification task and the reverse in a different classification task. In the current study, they investigated the reasons for this "L2-better-than-L1" effect. English-French bilinguals performed one word relatedness and two categorization tasks with verbs of motion (e.g., run) and psychological verbs (e.g., admire) in both languages. In the word relatedness task, participants judged how closely related pairs of verbs from both categories were. In a speeded semantic categorization task, participants classified the verbs according to their semantic category (psychological or motion). In an arbitrary classification task, participants had to learn how verbs had been assigned to two arbitrary categories. Participants performed better in L1 in the semantic classification task but paradoxically better in L2 in the arbitrary classification task. To account for these effects, the authors used the ratings from the word relatedness task to plot three-dimensional "semantic fields" for the verbs. Cross-language field differences were found to be significantly related to the paradoxical performance and to fluency levels. The results have implications for understanding of how bilinguals represent verbs in the mental lexicon. Copyright 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).

  18. The absoluteness of semantic processing: lessons from the analysis of temporal clusters in phonemic verbal fluency.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Isabelle Vonberg

    Full Text Available For word production, we may consciously pursue semantic or phonological search strategies, but it is uncertain whether we can retrieve the different aspects of lexical information independently from each other. We therefore studied the spread of semantic information into words produced under exclusively phonemic task demands.42 subjects participated in a letter verbal fluency task, demanding the production of as many s-words as possible in two minutes. Based on curve fittings for the time courses of word production, output spurts (temporal clusters considered to reflect rapid lexical retrieval based on automatic activation spread, were identified. Semantic and phonemic word relatedness within versus between these clusters was assessed by respective scores (0 meaning no relation, 4 maximum relation.Subjects produced 27.5 (±9.4 words belonging to 6.7 (±2.4 clusters. Both phonemically and semantically words were more related within clusters than between clusters (phon: 0.33±0.22 vs. 0.19±0.17, p<.01; sem: 0.65±0.29 vs. 0.37±0.29, p<.01. Whereas the extent of phonemic relatedness correlated with high task performance, the contrary was the case for the extent of semantic relatedness.The results indicate that semantic information spread occurs, even if the consciously pursued word search strategy is purely phonological. This, together with the negative correlation between semantic relatedness and verbal output suits the idea of a semantic default mode of lexical search, acting against rapid task performance in the given scenario of phonemic verbal fluency. The simultaneity of enhanced semantic and phonemic word relatedness within the same temporal cluster boundaries suggests an interaction between content and sound-related information whenever a new semantic field has been opened.

  19. Impact of Semantic Relatedness on Associative Memory: An ERP Study

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Pierre Desaunay

    2017-06-01

    Full Text Available Encoding and retrieval processes in memory for pairs of pictures are thought to be influenced by inter-item similarity and by features of individual items. Using Event-Related Potentials (ERP, we aimed to identify how these processes impact on both the early mid-frontal FN400 and the Late Positive Component (LPC potentials during associative retrieval of pictures. Twenty young adults undertook a sham task, using an incidental encoding of semantically related and unrelated pairs of drawings. At test, we conducted a recognition task in which participants were asked to identify target identical pairs of pictures, which could be semantically related or unrelated, among new and rearranged pairs. We observed semantic (related and unrelated pairs and condition effects (old, rearranged and new pairs on the early mid-frontal potential. First, a lower amplitude was shown for identical and rearranged semantically related pairs, which might reflect a retrieval process driven by semantic cues. Second, among semantically unrelated pairs, we found a larger negativity for identical pairs, compared to rearranged and new ones, suggesting additional retrieval processing that focuses on associative information. We also observed an LPC old/new effect with a mid-parietal and a right occipito-parietal topography for semantically related and unrelated old pairs, demonstrating a recollection phenomenon irrespective of the degree of association. These findings suggest that associative recognition using visual stimuli begins at early stages of retrieval, and differs according to the degree of semantic relatedness among items. However, either strategy may ultimately lead to recollection processes.

  20. Three more semantic serial position functions and a SIMPLE explanation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kelley, Matthew R; Neath, Ian; Surprenant, Aimée M

    2013-05-01

    There are innumerable demonstrations of serial position functions-with characteristic primacy and recency effects-in episodic tasks, but there are only a handful of such demonstrations in semantic memory tasks, and those demonstrations have used only two types of stimuli. Here, we provide three more examples of serial position functions when recalling from semantic memory. Participants were asked to reconstruct the order of (1) two cartoon theme song lyrics, (2) the seven Harry Potter books, and (3) two sets of movies, and all three demonstrations yielded conventional-looking serial position functions with primacy and recency effects. The data were well-fit by SIMPLE, a local distinctiveness model of memory that was originally designed to account for serial position effects in short- and long-term episodic memory. According to SIMPLE, serial position functions in both episodic and semantic memory tasks arise from the same type of processing: Items that are more separated from their close neighbors in psychological space at the time of recall will be better remembered. We argue that currently available evidence suggests that serial position functions observed when recalling items that are presumably in semantic memory arise because of the same processes as those observed when recalling items that are presumably in episodic memory.

  1. Semantic elaboration in auditory and visual spatial memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Taevs, Meghan; Dahmani, Louisa; Zatorre, Robert J; Bohbot, Véronique D

    2010-01-01

    The aim of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that semantic information facilitates auditory and visual spatial learning and memory. An auditory spatial task was administered, whereby healthy participants were placed in the center of a semi-circle that contained an array of speakers where the locations of nameable and non-nameable sounds were learned. In the visual spatial task, locations of pictures of abstract art intermixed with nameable objects were learned by presenting these items in specific locations on a computer screen. Participants took part in both the auditory and visual spatial tasks, which were counterbalanced for order and were learned at the same rate. Results showed that learning and memory for the spatial locations of nameable sounds and pictures was significantly better than for non-nameable stimuli. Interestingly, there was a cross-modal learning effect such that the auditory task facilitated learning of the visual task and vice versa. In conclusion, our results support the hypotheses that the semantic representation of items, as well as the presentation of items in different modalities, facilitate spatial learning and memory.

  2. Anterior temporal cortex and semantic memory: reconciling findings from neuropsychology and functional imaging.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rogers, Timothy T; Hocking, Julia; Noppeney, Uta; Mechelli, Andrea; Gorno-Tempini, Maria Luisa; Patterson, Karalyn; Price, Cathy J

    2006-09-01

    Studies of semantic impairment arising from brain disease suggest that the anterior temporal lobes are critical for semantic abilities in humans; yet activation of these regions is rarely reported in functional imaging studies of healthy controls performing semantic tasks. Here, we combined neuropsychological and PET functional imaging data to show that when healthy subjects identify concepts at a specific level, the regions activated correspond to the site of maximal atrophy in patients with relatively pure semantic impairment. The stimuli were color photographs of common animals or vehicles, and the task was category verification at specific (e.g., robin), intermediate (e.g., bird), or general (e.g., animal) levels. Specific, relative to general, categorization activated the antero-lateral temporal cortices bilaterally, despite matching of these experimental conditions for difficulty. Critically, in patients with atrophy in precisely these areas, the most pronounced deficit was in the retrieval of specific semantic information.

  3. Aggressive priming online: Facebook adverts can prime aggressive cognitions

    OpenAIRE

    Buchanan, Tom

    2015-01-01

    Through the process of priming, incidental stimuli in our environments can influence our thoughts, feelings and behavior. This may be true of incidental stimuli in online environments, such as adverts on websites. Two experiments (N=325, N=331) showed that the mere presence of advertisements with violent content on a simulated Facebook page induced higher levels of aggression-related cognition in comparison to non-violent adverts (d=0.56 , d=0.71). In a subsequent word recognition task, parti...

  4. Using Text Models In Diagnostic Tasks.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Korostil Yuriy

    2015-09-01

    Full Text Available This paper contains developing of a method of solving diagnostic tasks for complex technical objects (STO based on using text models (TMi to describe the functioning of STO. A TMi model is a text description, in normalized form, of all fragments of STO functioning process. The description of TMi is for med using semantic vocabularies of different types, which are generated on the basis of usage of information about all the aspects of STO construction and functioning. Such interpretation description is a subject area for tasks of STO diagnostics. Detection of malfunction and deviations of a functioning process of STO from an established functioning mode is implemented on the basis of analysis of semantic parameters of text description of the STO functioning process in order to determine semantic anomalies which occur in the descriptions of the STO functioning process, as well as in the descriptions of fragments of its functioning. Semantic anomalies occur in case when values of semantic parameters go beyond their established limits.

  5. A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Xiao Ming

    With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.

  6. Part-set cueing impairment & facilitation in semantic memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kelley, Matthew R; Parihar, Sushmeena A

    2018-01-19

    The present study explored the influence of part-set cues in semantic memory using tests of "free" recall, reconstruction of order, and serial recall. Nine distinct categories of information were used (e.g., Zodiac signs, Harry Potter books, Star Wars films, planets). The results showed part-set cueing impairment for all three "free" recall sets, whereas part-set cueing facilitation was evident for five of the six ordered sets. Generally, the present results parallel those often observed across episodic tasks, which could indicate that similar mechanisms contribute to part-set cueing effects in both episodic and semantic memory. A novel anchoring explanation of part-set cueing facilitation in order and spatial tasks is provided.

  7. Allograph priming is based on abstract letter identities: Evidence from Japanese kana.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kinoshita, Sachiko; Schubert, Teresa; Verdonschot, Rinus G

    2018-04-23

    It is well-established that allographs like the uppercase and lowercase forms of the Roman alphabet (e.g., a and A) map onto the same "abstract letter identity," orthographic representations that are independent of the visual form. Consistent with this, in the allograph match task ("Are 'a' and 'A' the same letter?"), priming by a masked letter prime is equally robust for visually dissimilar prime-target pairs (e.g., d and D) and similar pairs (e.g., c and C). However, in principle this pattern of priming is also consistent with the possibility that allograph priming is purely phonological, based on the letter name. Because different allographic forms of the same letter, by definition, share a letter name, it is impossible to rule out this possibility a priori. In the present study, we investigated the influence of shared letter names by taking advantage of the fact that Japanese is written in two distinct writing systems, syllabic kana-that has two parallel forms, hiragana and katakana-and logographic kanji. Using the allograph match task, we tested whether a kanji prime with the same pronunciation as the target kana (e.g., - い, both pronounced /i/) produces the same amount of priming as a kana prime in the opposite kana form (e.g., イ- い). We found that the kana primes produced substantially greater priming than the phonologically identical kanji prime, which we take as evidence that allograph priming is based on abstract kana identity, not purely phonology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

  8. Semantic Encoding Enhances the Pictorial Superiority Effect in the Oldest-Old

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cherry, Katie E.; Brown, Jennifer Silva; Walker, Erin Jackson; Smitherman, Emily A.; Boudreaux, Emily O.; Volaufova, Julia; Jazwinski, S. Michal

    2011-01-01

    We examined the effect of a semantic orienting task during encoding on free recall and recognition of simple line drawings and matching words in middle-aged (44 to 59 years), older (60 to 89 years), and oldest-old (90 + years) adults. Participants studied line drawings and matching words presented in blocked order. Half of the participants were given a semantic orienting task and the other half received standard intentional learning instructions. Results confirmed that the pictorial superiority effect was greater in magnitude following semantic encoding compared to the control condition. Analyses of clustering in free recall revealed that oldest-old adults’ encoding and retrieval strategies were generally similar to the two younger groups. Self-reported strategy use was less frequent among the oldest-old adults. These data strongly suggest that semantic elaboration is an effective compensatory mechanism underlying preserved episodic memory performance that persists well into the ninth decade of life. PMID:22053814

  9. Self-Construal Priming Modulates Self-Evaluation under Social Threat

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Tianyang Zhang

    2017-10-01

    Full Text Available Previous studies have shown that Westerners evaluate themselves in an especially flattering way when faced with a social-evaluative threat. The current study first investigated whether East Asians also have a similar pattern by recruiting Chinese participants and using social-evaluative threat manipulations in which participants perform self-evaluation tasks while adopting different social-evaluative feedbacks (Experiment 1. Then further examined whether the different response patterns can be modulated by different types of self-construal by using social-evaluative threat manipulations in conjunction with a self-construal priming task (Experiment 2. The results showed that, as opposed to Westerners' pattern, Chinese participants rated themselves as having significantly greater above-average effect only when faced with the nonthreatening feedback but not the social-evaluative threat. More importantly, we found that self-construal modulated the self-evaluation under social-evaluative threat: following independent self-construal priming, participants tended to show a greater above-average effect when faced with a social-evaluative threat. However, this pattern in conjunction with a social threat disappeared after participants received interdependent self-construal priming or neutral priming. These findings suggest that the effects of social-evaluative threat on self-evaluation are not culturally universal and is strongly modulated by self-construal priming.

  10. Behavioural and magnetoencephalographic evidence for the interaction between semantic and episodic memory in healthy elderly subjects.

    Science.gov (United States)

    La Corte, Valentina; Dalla Barba, Gianfranco; Lemaréchal, Jean-Didier; Garnero, Line; George, Nathalie

    2012-10-01

    The relationship between episodic and semantic memory systems has long been debated. Some authors argue that episodic memory is contingent on semantic memory (Tulving 1984), while others postulate that both systems are independent since they can be selectively damaged (Squire 1987). The interaction between these memory systems is particularly important in the elderly, since the dissociation of episodic and semantic memory defects characterize different aging-related pathologies. Here, we investigated the interaction between semantic knowledge and episodic memory processes associated with faces in elderly subjects using an experimental paradigm where the semantic encoding of famous and unknown faces was compared to their episodic recognition. Results showed that the level of semantic awareness of items affected the recognition of those items in the episodic memory task. Event-related magnetic fields confirmed this interaction between episodic and semantic memory: ERFs related to the old/new effect during the episodic task were markedly different for famous and unknown faces. The old/new effect for famous faces involved sustained activities maximal over right temporal sensors, showing a spatio-temporal pattern partly similar to that found for famous versus unknown faces during the semantic task. By contrast, an old/new effect for unknown faces was observed on left parieto-occipital sensors. These findings suggest that the episodic memory for famous faces activated the retrieval of stored semantic information, whereas it was based on items' perceptual features for unknown faces. Overall, our results show that semantic information interfered markedly with episodic memory processes and suggested that the neural substrates of these two memory systems overlap.

  11. False belief and semantic language development in children aged 2 to 4 years

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    Milton Eduardo Bermúdez-Jaimes

    2010-02-01

    Full Text Available We intended to explore and characterize the relationships between the development of understanding childhood theories of mind and the semantic development of language. We used three versions of the false belief task,programmed with Flash, and the Early Language Development Battery in order to assess semantic abilities in 116 children aged two to four years. Significant differences among ages were found for task performance, and positive associations between social comprehension and language development were found in two tasks. Results were interpreted through the interaction proposal by Wellman (1994.

  12. Electrophysiological signatures of phonological and semantic maintenance in sentence repetition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Meltzer, Jed A; Kielar, Aneta; Panamsky, Lilia; Links, Kira A; Deschamps, Tiffany; Leigh, Rosie C

    2017-08-01

    Verbal short-term memory comprises resources for phonological rehearsal, which have been characterized anatomically, and for maintenance of semantic information, which are less understood. Sentence repetition tasks tap both processes interactively. To distinguish brain activity involved in phonological vs. semantic maintenance, we recorded magnetoencephalography during a sentence repetition task, incorporating three manipulations emphasizing one mechanism over the other. Participants heard sentences or word lists and attempted to repeat them verbatim after a 5-second delay. After MEG, participants completed a cued recall task testing how much they remembered of each sentence. Greater semantic engagement relative to phonological rehearsal was hypothesized for 1) sentences vs. word lists, 2) concrete vs. abstract sentences, and 3) well recalled vs. poorly recalled sentences. During auditory perception and the memory delay period, we found highly left-lateralized activation in the form of 8-30 Hz event-related desynchronization. Compared to abstract sentences, concrete sentences recruited posterior temporal cortex bilaterally, demonstrating a neural signature for the engagement of visual imagery in sentence maintenance. Maintenance of arbitrary word lists recruited right hemisphere dorsal regions, reflecting increased demands on phonological rehearsal. Sentences that were ultimately poorly recalled in the post-test also elicited extra right hemisphere activation when they were held in short-term memory, suggesting increased demands on phonological resources. Frontal midline theta oscillations also reflected phonological rather than semantic demand, being increased for word lists and poorly recalled sentences. These findings highlight distinct neural resources for phonological and semantic maintenance, with phonological maintenance associated with stronger oscillatory modulations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  13. The semantic similarity ensemble

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    Andrea Ballatore

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available Computational measures of semantic similarity between geographic terms provide valuable support across geographic information retrieval, data mining, and information integration. To date, a wide variety of approaches to geo-semantic similarity have been devised. A judgment of similarity is not intrinsically right or wrong, but obtains a certain degree of cognitive plausibility, depending on how closely it mimics human behavior. Thus selecting the most appropriate measure for a specific task is a significant challenge. To address this issue, we make an analogy between computational similarity measures and soliciting domain expert opinions, which incorporate a subjective set of beliefs, perceptions, hypotheses, and epistemic biases. Following this analogy, we define the semantic similarity ensemble (SSE as a composition of different similarity measures, acting as a panel of experts having to reach a decision on the semantic similarity of a set of geographic terms. The approach is evaluated in comparison to human judgments, and results indicate that an SSE performs better than the average of its parts. Although the best member tends to outperform the ensemble, all ensembles outperform the average performance of each ensemble's member. Hence, in contexts where the best measure is unknown, the ensemble provides a more cognitively plausible approach.

  14. Mediated priming in the lexical decision task : Evidence from event-related potentials and reaction time

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Chwilla, DJ; Kolk, HHJ; Mulder, G

    Mediated priming (e.g., from LION to STRIPES vis TIGER) is predicted by spreading activation models hut only by some integration model. The goal of the present research was to localize mediated priming by assessing two-step priming effects on N400 and reaction times (RT). We propose that the N400

  15. Semantics for Communicating Actors with Interdependent Real-Time Deadlines

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Knoll, Istvan; Ravn, Anders Peter; Skou, Arne

    2009-01-01

    on the results, these tools must use consistent semantics for the model. Yet, a monolithic semantic model is just as complex as the entity it describes. In order to circumvent this issue, we define a three level semantics giving independent definitions of the functionality of actors, the temporal properties...... of communications, and finally imposing deadlines on the timing of dependent actors. With this approach the semantics is used directly in developing a simulator supporting the nondeterminism of the abstract semantics such that e.g. potential race conditions can be detected. The layers are also planned to underpin...... independent specialized verification tools. The verification task for timed, hybrid systems can thus be divided into the continuous, discrete, and timing domains with automated translation to specialized tools, and this promises better scalability than simulation or model checking of one complex model....

  16. Implicit learning in psychotic patients

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Schmand, B.; Kop, W. J.; Kuipers, T.; Bosveld, J.

    1992-01-01

    Implicit verbal learning of psychotic patients (n = 59) and non-psychotic control patients (n = 20) was studied using stem completion and association tasks in lexical and semantic priming paradigms. Performance on these tasks was contrasted with explicit memory on Rey's verbal learning test.

  17. Designing learning management system interoperability in semantic web

    Science.gov (United States)

    Anistyasari, Y.; Sarno, R.; Rochmawati, N.

    2018-01-01

    The extensive adoption of learning management system (LMS) has set the focus on the interoperability requirement. Interoperability is the ability of different computer systems, applications or services to communicate, share and exchange data, information, and knowledge in a precise, effective and consistent way. Semantic web technology and the use of ontologies are able to provide the required computational semantics and interoperability for the automation of tasks in LMS. The purpose of this study is to design learning management system interoperability in the semantic web which currently has not been investigated deeply. Moodle is utilized to design the interoperability. Several database tables of Moodle are enhanced and some features are added. The semantic web interoperability is provided by exploited ontology in content materials. The ontology is further utilized as a searching tool to match user’s queries and available courses. It is concluded that LMS interoperability in Semantic Web is possible to be performed.

  18. Autobiographically significant concepts: more episodic than semantic in nature? An electrophysiological investigation of overlapping types of memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Renoult, Louis; Davidson, Patrick S R; Schmitz, Erika; Park, Lillian; Campbell, Kenneth; Moscovitch, Morris; Levine, Brian

    2015-01-01

    A common assertion is that semantic memory emerges from episodic memory, shedding the distinctive contexts associated with episodes over time and/or repeated instances. Some semantic concepts, however, may retain their episodic origins or acquire episodic information during life experiences. The current study examined this hypothesis by investigating the ERP correlates of autobiographically significant (AS) concepts, that is, semantic concepts that are associated with vivid episodic memories. We inferred the contribution of semantic and episodic memory to AS concepts using the amplitudes of the N400 and late positive component, respectively. We compared famous names that easily brought to mind episodic memories (high AS names) against equally famous names that did not bring such recollections to mind (low AS names) on a semantic task (fame judgment) and an episodic task (recognition memory). Compared with low AS names, high AS names were associated with increased amplitude of the late positive component in both tasks. Moreover, in the recognition task, this effect of AS was highly correlated with recognition confidence. In contrast, the N400 component did not differentiate the high versus low AS names but, instead, was related to the amount of general knowledge participants had regarding each name. These results suggest that semantic concepts high in AS, such as famous names, have an episodic component and are associated with similar brain processes to those that are engaged by episodic memory. Studying AS concepts may provide unique insights into how episodic and semantic memory interact.

  19. Type-specific proactive interference in patients with semantic and phonological STM deficits.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harris, Lara; Olson, Andrew; Humphreys, Glyn

    2014-01-01

    Prior neuropsychological evidence suggests that semantic and phonological components of short-term memory (STM) are functionally and neurologically distinct. The current paper examines proactive interference (PI) from semantic and phonological information in two STM-impaired patients, DS (semantic STM deficit) and AK (phonological STM deficit). In Experiment 1 probe recognition tasks with open and closed sets of stimuli were used. Phonological PI was assessed using nonword items, and semantic and phonological PI was assessed using words. In Experiment 2 phonological and semantic PI was elicited by an item recognition probe test with stimuli that bore phonological and semantic relations to the probes. The data suggested heightened phonological PI for the semantic STM patient, and exaggerated effects of semantic PI in the phonological STM case. The findings are consistent with an account of extremely rapid decay of activated type-specific representations in cases of severely impaired phonological and semantic STM.

  20. Dissociating mere exposure and repetition priming as a function of word type.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Butler, Laurie T; Berry, Dianne C; Helman, Shaun

    2004-07-01

    The mere exposure effect is defined as enhanced attitude toward a stimulus that has been repeatedly exposed. Repetition priming is defined as facilitated processing of a previously exposed stimulus. We conducted a direct comparison between the two phenomena to test the assumption that the mere exposure effect represents an example of repetition priming. In two experiments, having studied a set of words or nonwords, participants were given a repetition priming task (perceptual identification) or one of two mere exposure (affective liking or preference judgment) tasks. Repetition priming was obtained for both words and nonwords, but only nonwords produced a mere exposure effect. This demonstrates a key boundary for observing the mere exposure effect, one not readily accommodated by a perceptual representation systems (Tulving & Schacter, 1990) account, which assumes that both phenomena should show some sensitivity to nonwords and words.

  1. Solving Multiple Isolated, Interleaved, and Blended Tasks through Modular Neuroevolution.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schrum, Jacob; Miikkulainen, Risto

    2016-01-01

    Many challenging sequential decision-making problems require agents to master multiple tasks. For instance, game agents may need to gather resources, attack opponents, and defend against attacks. Learning algorithms can thus benefit from having separate policies for these tasks, and from knowing when each one is appropriate. How well this approach works depends on how tightly coupled the tasks are. Three cases are identified: Isolated tasks have distinct semantics and do not interact, interleaved tasks have distinct semantics but do interact, and blended tasks have regions where semantics from multiple tasks overlap. Learning across multiple tasks is studied in this article with Modular Multiobjective NEAT, a neuroevolution framework applied to three variants of the challenging Ms. Pac-Man video game. In the standard blended version of the game, a surprising, highly effective machine-discovered task division surpasses human-specified divisions, achieving the best scores to date in this game. In isolated and interleaved versions of the game, human-specified task divisions are also successful, though the best scores are surprisingly still achieved by machine discovery. Modular neuroevolution is thus shown to be capable of finding useful, unexpected task divisions better than those apparent to a human designer.

  2. Functional imaging of the semantic system: retrieval of sensory-experienced and verbally learned knowledge.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Noppeney, Uta; Price, Cathy J

    2003-01-01

    This paper considers how functional neuro-imaging can be used to investigate the organization of the semantic system and the limitations associated with this technique. The majority of the functional imaging studies of the semantic system have looked for divisions by varying stimulus category. These studies have led to divergent results and no clear anatomical hypotheses have emerged to account for the dissociations seen in behavioral studies. Only a few functional imaging studies have used task as a variable to differentiate the neural correlates of semantic features more directly. We extend these findings by presenting a new study that contrasts tasks that differentially weight sensory (color and taste) and verbally learned (origin) semantic features. Irrespective of the type of semantic feature retrieved, a common semantic system was activated as demonstrated in many previous studies. In addition, the retrieval of verbally learned, but not sensory-experienced, features enhanced activation in medial and lateral posterior parietal areas. We attribute these "verbally learned" effects to differences in retrieval strategy and conclude that evidence for segregation of semantic features at an anatomical level remains weak. We believe that functional imaging has the potential to increase our understanding of the neuronal infrastructure that sustains semantic processing but progress may require multiple experiments until a consistent explanatory framework emerges.

  3. Semantic memory: a feature-based analysis and new norms for Italian.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Montefinese, Maria; Ambrosini, Ettore; Fairfield, Beth; Mammarella, Nicola

    2013-06-01

    Semantic norms for properties produced by native speakers are valuable tools for researchers interested in the structure of semantic memory and in category-specific semantic deficits in individuals following brain damage. The aims of this study were threefold. First, we sought to extend existing semantic norms by adopting an empirical approach to category (Exp. 1) and concept (Exp. 2) selection, in order to obtain a more representative set of semantic memory features. Second, we extensively outlined a new set of semantic production norms collected from Italian native speakers for 120 artifactual and natural basic-level concepts, using numerous measures and statistics following a feature-listing task (Exp. 3b). Finally, we aimed to create a new publicly accessible database, since only a few existing databases are publicly available online.

  4. The effect of working memory load on semantic illusions: what the phonological loop and central executive have to contribute.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Büttner, Anke Caroline

    2012-01-01

    When asked how many animals of each kind Moses took on the Ark, most people respond with "two" despite the substituted name (Moses for Noah) in the question. Possible explanations for semantic illusions appear to be related to processing limitations such as those of working memory. Indeed, individual working memory capacity has an impact upon how sentences containing substitutions are processed. This experiment examined further the role of working memory in the occurrence of semantic illusions using a dual-task working memory load approach. Participants verified statements while engaging in either articulatory suppression or random number generation. Secondary task type had a significant effect on semantic illusion rate, but only when comparing the control condition to the two dual-task conditions. Furthermore, secondary task performance in the random number generation condition declined, suggesting a tradeoff between tasks. Response time analyses also showed a different pattern of processing across the conditions. The findings suggest that the phonological loop plays a role in representing semantic illusion sentences coherently and in monitoring for details, while the role of the central executive is to assist gist-processing of sentences. This usually efficient strategy leads to error in the case of semantic illusions.

  5. Semantic Dementia Shows both Storage and Access Disorders of Semantic Memory

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yumi Takahashi

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available Objective. Previous studies have shown that some patients with semantic dementia (SD have memory storage disorders, while others have access disorders. Here, we report three SD cases with both disorders. Methods. Ten pictures and ten words were prepared as visual stimuli to determine if the patients could correctly answer names and select pictures after hearing the names of items (Card Presentation Task, assessing memory storage disorder. In a second task, the viewing time was set at 20 or 300 msec (Momentary Presentation Task, evaluating memory access disorder using items for which correct answers were given in the first task. The results were compared with those for 6 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD. Results. The SD patients had lower scores than the AD group for both tasks, suggesting both storage and access disorders. The AD group had almost perfect scores on the Card Presentation Task but showed impairment on the Momentary Presentation Task, although to a lesser extent than the SD cases. Conclusions. These results suggest that SD patients have both storage and access disorders and have more severe access disorder than patients with AD.

  6. Speed and Accuracy in the Processing of False Statements About Semantic Information.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ratcliff, Roger

    1982-01-01

    A standard reaction time procedure and a response signal procedure were used on data from eight experiments on semantic verifications. Results suggest that simple models of the semantic verification task that assume a single yes/no dimension on which discrimination is made are not correct. (Author/PN)

  7. Effects of Semantic Elaboration and Typicality on Picture Naming in Alzheimer Disease

    Science.gov (United States)

    Morelli, Claudia A.; Altmann, Lori J. P.; Kendall, Diane; Fischler, Ira; Heilman, Kennneth M.

    2011-01-01

    Purpose: Individuals with probable Alzheimer disease (pAD) are frequently impaired at picture naming. This study examined whether a semantic elaboration task would facilitate naming in pAD, and whether training either semantically typical or atypical stimulus items facilitated generalized improvement in picture naming and category generation…

  8. Automatic and Controlled Semantic Retrieval: TMS Reveals Distinct Contributions of Posterior Middle Temporal Gyrus and Angular Gyrus.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Davey, James; Cornelissen, Piers L; Thompson, Hannah E; Sonkusare, Saurabh; Hallam, Glyn; Smallwood, Jonathan; Jefferies, Elizabeth

    2015-11-18

    Semantic retrieval involves both (1) automatic spreading activation between highly related concepts and (2) executive control processes that tailor this activation to suit the current context or goals. Two structures in left temporoparietal cortex, angular gyrus (AG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG), are thought to be crucial to semantic retrieval and are often recruited together during semantic tasks; however, they show strikingly different patterns of functional connectivity at rest (coupling with the "default mode network" and "frontoparietal control system," respectively). Here, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to establish a causal yet dissociable role for these sites in semantic cognition in human volunteers. TMS to AG disrupted thematic judgments particularly when the link between probe and target was strong (e.g., a picture of an Alsatian with a bone), and impaired the identification of objects at a specific but not a superordinate level (for the verbal label "Alsatian" not "animal"). In contrast, TMS to pMTG disrupted thematic judgments for weak but not strong associations (e.g., a picture of an Alsatian with razor wire), and impaired identity matching for both superordinate and specific-level labels. Thus, stimulation to AG interfered with the automatic retrieval of specific concepts from the semantic store while stimulation of pMTG impaired semantic cognition when there was a requirement to flexibly shape conceptual activation in line with the task requirements. These results demonstrate that AG and pMTG make a dissociable contribution to automatic and controlled aspects of semantic retrieval. We demonstrate a novel functional dissociation between the angular gyrus (AG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) in conceptual processing. These sites are often coactivated during neuroimaging studies using semantic tasks, but their individual contributions are unclear. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation and tasks designed to

  9. Self-referential processing is distinct from semantic elaboration: evidence from long-term memory effects in a patient with amnesia and semantic impairments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sui, Jie; Humphreys, Glyn W

    2013-11-01

    We report data demonstrating that self-referential encoding facilitates memory performance in the absence of effects of semantic elaboration in a severely amnesic patient also suffering semantic problems. In Part 1, the patient, GA, was trained to associate items with the self or a familiar other during the encoding phase of a memory task (self-ownership decisions in Experiment 1 and self-evaluation decisions in Experiment 2). Tests of memory showed a consistent self-reference advantage, relative to a condition where the reference was another person in both experiments. The pattern of the self-reference advantage was similar to that in healthy controls. In Part 2 we demonstrate that GA showed minimal effects of semantic elaboration on memory for items he semantically classified, compared with items subject to physical size decisions; in contrast, healthy controls demonstrated enhanced memory performance after semantic relative to physical encoding. The results indicate that self-referential encoding, not semantic elaboration, improves memory in amnesia. Self-referential processing may provide a unique scaffold to help improve learning in amnesic cases. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  10. Age-related vulnerability in the neural systems supporting semantic processing

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jonathan E Peelle

    2013-09-01

    Full Text Available Our ability to form abstract representations of objects in semantic memory is crucial to language and thought. The utility of this information relies both on the representations of sensory-motor feature knowledge stored in long-term memory and the executive processes required to retrieve, manipulate, and evaluate this semantic knowledge in a task-relevant manner. These complementary components of semantic memory can be differentially impacted by aging. We investigated semantic processing in normal aging using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI. Young and older adults were asked to judge whether two printed object names match on a particular feature (for example, whether a tomato and strawberry have the same color. The task thus required both retrieval of relevant visual feature knowledge of object concepts and evaluating this information. Objects were drawn from either natural kinds or manufactured objects, and were queried on either color or shape in a factorial design. Behaviorally, all subjects performed well, but older adults could be divided into those whose performance matched that of young adults (better performers and those whose performance was worse (poorer performers. All subjects activated several cortical regions while performing this task, including bilateral inferior and lateral temporal cortex and left frontal and prefrontal cortex. Better performing older adults showed increased overall activity in bilateral premotor cortex and left lateral occipital cortex compared to young adults, and increased activity in these brain regions relative to poorer performing older adults who also showed gray matter atrophy in premotor cortex. These findings highlight the contribution of domain-general executive processing brain regions to semantic memory, and illustrate differences in how these regions are recruited in healthy older adults.

  11. Context effects in embodied lexical-semantic processing

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Wessel O Van Dam

    2010-10-01

    Full Text Available The embodied view of language comprehension proposes that the meaning of words is grounded in perception and action rather than represented in abstract amodal symbols. Support for embodied theories of language processing comes from behavioural studies showing that understanding a sentence about an action can modulate congruent and incongruent physical responses, suggesting motor involvement during comprehension of sentences referring to bodily movement. Additionally, several neuroimaging studies have provided evidence that comprehending single words denoting manipulable objects elicits specific responses in the neural motor system. An interesting question that remains is whether action semantic knowledge is directly activated as motor simulations in the brain, or rather modulated by the semantic context in which action words are encountered. In the current paper we investigated the nature of conceptual representations using a go/no-go lexical decision task. Specifically, target words were either presented in a semantic context that emphasized dominant action features (features related to the functional use of an object or non-dominant action features. The response latencies in a lexical decision task reveal that participants were faster to respond to words denoting objects for which the functional use was congruent with the prepared movement. This facilitation effect, however, was only apparent when the semantic context emphasized corresponding motor properties. These findings suggest that motor involvement during comprehension of sentences is not automatic. Rather, the results suggest that conceptual processing is a context-dependent process that incorporates motor-related knowledge in a flexible manner.

  12. Can gender priming eliminate the effects of stereotype threat? The case of simple dynamic systems.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lungwitz, Vivien; Sedlmeier, Peter; Schwarz, Marcus

    2018-05-31

    Mathematics and mental rotation are classic fields where it has been shown that priming women with their gender identity impedes performance. Whereas past research focused mainly on stereotype threat effects in women in a narrowly defined context, this study broadened the research focus: We primed 264 women and men equally with a male, a neutral, or a female prime before they had to solve a simple dynamic system task. As expected, female-primed women subsequently performed worst of all six groups. Solution rates were almost 14% higher for the women in the male-primed condition. Men performed better than women in all three priming conditions. However, this difference was reduced in the male-primed condition as women's performance had increased as anticipated. Unexpected was a decline in the male performance in the same condition. The study showed that gender priming had a significant effect on women in tasks involving simple dynamic systems. However, mathematical knowledge and area of occupation clearly were stronger predictors for both men and women. Priming alone cannot eliminate the effects of stereotype threat. Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier B.V.

  13. Theta and Alpha Alterations in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment in Semantic Go/NoGo Tasks

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Lydia T. Nguyen

    2017-05-01

    Full Text Available Growing evidence suggests that cognitive control processes are impaired in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI; however the nature of these alterations needs further examination. The current study examined differences in electroencephalographic theta and alpha power related to cognitive control processes involving response execution and response inhibition in 22 individuals with aMCI and 22 age-, sex-, and education-matched cognitively normal controls. Two Go/NoGo tasks involving semantic categorization were used. In the basic categorization task, Go/NoGo responses were made based on exemplars of a single car (Go and a single dog (NoGo. In the superordinate categorization task, responses were made based on multiple exemplars of objects (Go and animals (NoGo. Behavioral data showed that the aMCI group had more false alarms during the NoGo trials compared to controls. The EEG data revealed between group differences related to response type in theta (4–7 Hz and low-frequency alpha (8–10 Hz power. In particular, the aMCI group differed from controls in theta power during the NoGo trials at frontal and parietal electrodes, and in low-frequency alpha power during Go trials at parietal electrodes. These results suggest that alterations in theta power converge with behavioral deterioration in response inhibition, whereas alterations in low-frequency alpha power appear to precede behavioral changes in response execution. Both behavioral and electrophysiological correlates combined provide a more comprehensive characterization of cognitive control deficits in aMCI.

  14. Episodic and Semantic Memory Contribute to Familiar and Novel Episodic Future Thinking

    OpenAIRE

    Tong Wang; Tong Yue; Xi ting Huang

    2016-01-01

    Abstract Increasing evidence indicates that episodic future thinking (EFT) relies on both episodic and semantic memory; however, event familiarity may importantly affect the extent to which episodic and semantic memory contribute to EFT. To test this possibility, two behavioral experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, we directly compared the proportion of episodic and semantic memory used in an EFT task. The results indicated that more episodic memory was used when imagining familiar fut...

  15. Resolving Semantic Interference during Word Production Requires Central Attention

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kleinman, Daniel

    2013-01-01

    The semantic picture-word interference task has been used to diagnose how speakers resolve competition while selecting words for production. The attentional demands of this resolution process were assessed in 2 dual-task experiments (tone classification followed by picture naming). In Experiment 1, when pictures and distractor words were presented…

  16. Cognitive training of self-initiation of semantic encoding strategies in schizophrenia: A pilot study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guimond, Synthia; Lepage, Martin

    2016-01-01

    Available cognitive remediation interventions have a significant but relatively small to moderate impact on episodic memory in schizophrenia. The present study aimed to evaluate the efficacy and feasibility of a brief novel episodic memory training targeting the self-initiation of semantic encoding strategies. To select patients with such deficits, 28 participants with schizophrenia performed our Semantic Encoding Memory Task (SEMT) that provides a measure of self-initiated semantic encoding strategies. This task identified a deficit in 13 participants who were then offered two 60-minute training sessions one week apart. After the training, patients performed an alternate version of the SEMT. The CVLT-II (a standardised measure of semantic encoding strategies) and the BVMT-R (a control spatial memory task) were used to quantify memory pre- and post-training. After the training, participants were significantly better at self-initiating semantic encoding strategies in the SEMT (p = .004) and in the CVLT-II (p = .002). No significant differences were found in the BVMT-R. The current study demonstrates that a brief and specific training in memory strategies can help patients to improve a deficient memory process in schizophrenia. Future studies will need to test this intervention further using a randomised controlled trial, and to explore its functional impact.

  17. Perceptual processing during trauma, priming and the development of intrusive memories

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sündermann, Oliver; Hauschildt, Marit; Ehlers, Anke

    2013-01-01

    Background Intrusive reexperiencing in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is commonly triggered by stimuli with perceptual similarity to those present during the trauma. Information processing theories suggest that perceptual processing during the trauma and enhanced perceptual priming contribute to the easy triggering of intrusive memories by these cues. Methods Healthy volunteers (N = 51) watched neutral and trauma picture stories on a computer screen. Neutral objects that were unrelated to the content of the stories briefly appeared in the interval between the pictures. Dissociation and data-driven processing (as indicators of perceptual processing) and state anxiety during the stories were assessed with self-report questionnaires. After filler tasks, participants completed a blurred object identification task to assess priming and a recognition memory task. Intrusive memories were assessed with telephone interviews 2 weeks and 3 months later. Results Neutral objects were more strongly primed if they occurred in the context of trauma stories than if they occurred during neutral stories, although the effect size was only moderate (ηp2=.08) and only significant when trauma stories were presented first. Regardless of story order, enhanced perceptual priming predicted intrusive memories at 2-week follow-up (N = 51), but not at 3 months (n = 40). Data-driven processing, dissociation and anxiety increases during the trauma stories also predicted intrusive memories. Enhanced perceptual priming and data-driven processing were associated with lower verbal intelligence. Limitations It is unclear to what extent these findings generalize to real-life traumatic events and whether they are specific to negative emotional events. Conclusions The results provide some support for the role of perceptual processing and perceptual priming in reexperiencing symptoms. PMID:23207970

  18. Different Neural Systems Contribute to Semantic Bias and Conflict Detection in the Inclusion Fallacy Task

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Peipeng eLiang

    2014-10-01

    Full Text Available more general conclusion category is considered stronger than a generalization to a specific conclusion category nested within the more general set. Such inferences violate rational norms and are part of the reasoning fallacy literature that provides interesting tasks to explore cognitive and neural basis of reasoning. To explore the functional neuroanatomy of the inclusion fallacy, we used a 2×2 factorial design, with factors for Quantification (explicit and implicit and Response (fallacious and nonfallacious. It was found that a left fronto-temporal system, along with a superior medial frontal system, was specifically activated in response to fallacy responses consistent with a semantic biasing of judgment explanation. A right fronto-parietal system was specifically recruited in response to detecting conflict associated with the heightened fallacy condition. These results are largely consistent with previous studies of reasoning fallacy and support a multiple systems model of reasoning.

  19. Are there mental lexicons? The role of semantics in lexical decision.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dilkina, Katia; McClelland, James L; Plaut, David C

    2010-12-13

    What is the underlying representation of lexical knowledge? How do we know whether a given string of letters is a word, whereas another string of letters is not? There are two competing models of lexical processing in the literature. The first proposes that we rely on mental lexicons. The second claims there are no mental lexicons; we identify certain items as words based on semantic knowledge. Thus, the former approach - the multiple-systems view - posits that lexical and semantic processing are subserved by separate systems, whereas the latter approach - the single-system view - holds that the two are interdependent. Semantic dementia patients, who have a cross-modal semantic impairment, show an accompanying and related lexical deficit. These findings support the single-system approach. However, a report of an SD patient whose impairment on lexical decision was not related to his semantic deficits in item-specific ways has presented a challenge to this view. If the two types of processing rely on a common system, then shouldn't damage impair the same items on all tasks? We present a single-system model of lexical and semantic processing, where there are no lexicons, and performance on lexical decision involves the activation of semantic representations. We show how, when these representations are damaged, accuracy on semantic and lexical tasks falls off together, but not necessarily on the same set of items. These findings are congruent with the patient data. We provide an explicit explanation of this pattern of results in our model, by defining and measuring the effects of two orthogonal factors - spelling consistency and concept consistency. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  20. Priming Facial Gender and Emotional Valence: The Influence of Spatial Frequency on Face Perception in ASD

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vanmarcke, Steven; Wagemans, Johan

    2017-01-01

    Adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) performed two priming experiments in which they implicitly processed a prime stimulus, containing high and/or low spatial frequency information, and then explicitly categorized a target face either as male/female (gender task) or as positive/negative (Valence task). Adolescents with ASD…

  1. Enemies and Friends in the Neighborhood: Orthographic Similarity Effects in Semantic Categorization

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pecher, Diane; Zeelenberg, Rene; Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan

    2005-01-01

    Studies investigating orthographic similarity effects in semantic tasks have produced inconsistent results. The authors investigated orthographic similarity effects in animacy decision and in contrast with previous studies, they took semantic congruency into account. In Experiments 1 and 2, performance to a target (cat) was better if a previously…

  2. Semantic networks for odors and colors in Alzheimer's disease.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Razani, Jill; Chan, Agnes; Nordin, Steven; Murphy, Claire

    2010-05-01

    Impairment in odor-naming ability and in verbal and visual semantic networks raised the hypothesis of a breakdown in the semantic network for odors in Alzheimer's disease (AD). The current study addressed this hypothesis. Twenty-four individuals, half patients with probable AD and half control participants, performed triadic-similarity judgments for odors and colors, separately, which, utilizing the multidimensional scaling (MDS) technique of individual difference scaling analysis (INDSCAL), generated two-dimensional configurations of similarity. The abilities to match odors and colors with written name labels were assessed to investigate disease-related differences in ability to identify and conceptualize the stimuli. In addition, responses on attribute-sorting tasks, requiring the odor and color perceptions to be categorized as one polarity of a certain dimension, were obtained to allow for objective interpretation of the MDS spatial maps. Whereas comparison subjects generated spatial maps based predominantly on relatively abstract characteristics, patients with AD classified odors on perceptual characteristics. The maps for patients with AD also showed disorganized groupings and loose associations between odors. Their normal configurations for colors imply that the patients were able to comprehend the task per se. The data for label matching and for attribute sorting provide further evidence for a disturbance in semantic odor memory in AD. The patients performed poorer than controls on both these odor tasks, implying that the ability to identify and/or conceptualize odors is impaired in AD. The results provide clear evidence for deterioration of the structure of semantic knowledge for odors in AD.

  3. Episodic retrieval and feature facilitation in intertrial priming of visual search

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Asgeirsson, Arni Gunnar; Kristjánsson, Árni

    2011-01-01

    Abstract Huang, Holcombe, and Pashler (Memory & Cognition, 32, 12–20, 2004) found that priming from repetition of different features of a target in a visual search task resulted in significant response time (RT) reductions when both target brightness and size were repeated. But when only one...... feature was repeated and the other changed, RTs were longer than when neither feature was repeated. From this, they argued that priming in visual search reflected episodic retrieval of memory traces, rather than facilitation of repeated features. We tested different varia- tions of the search task...

  4. Mapping lexical-semantic networks and determining hemispheric language dominance: Do task design, sex, age, and language performance make a difference?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chang, Yu-Hsuan A; Javadi, Sogol S; Bahrami, Naeim; Uttarwar, Vedang S; Reyes, Anny; McDonald, Carrie R

    2018-04-01

    Blocked and event-related fMRI designs are both commonly used to localize language networks and determine hemispheric dominance in research and clinical settings. We compared activation profiles on a semantic monitoring task using one of the two designs in a total of 43 healthy individual to determine whether task design or subject-specific factors (i.e., age, sex, or language performance) influence activation patterns. We found high concordance between the two designs within core language regions, including the inferior frontal, posterior temporal, and basal temporal region. However, differences emerged within inferior parietal cortex. Subject-specific factors did not influence activation patterns, nor did they interact with task design. These results suggest that despite high concordance within perisylvian regions that are robust to subject-specific factors, methodological differences between blocked and event-related designs may contribute to parietal activations. These findings provide important information for researchers incorporating fMRI results into meta-analytic studies, as well as for clinicians using fMRI to guide pre-surgical planning. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  5. Decomposition into Multiple Morphemes during Lexical Access: A Masked Priming Study of Russian Nouns

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kazanina, Nina; Dukova-Zheleva, Galina; Geber, Dana; Kharlamov, Viktor; Tonciulescu, Keren

    2008-01-01

    The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) "transparent," in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the…

  6. Neuroanatomical and cognitive mediators of age-related differences in perceptual priming and learning

    OpenAIRE

    Kennedy, Kristen M.; Rodrigue, Karen M.; Head, Denise; Gunning-Dixon, Faith; Raz, Naftali

    2009-01-01

    Our objectives were to assess age differences in perceptual repetition priming and perceptual skill learning, and to determine whether they are mediated by cognitive resources and regional cerebral volume differences. Fragmented picture identification paradigm allows the study of both priming and learning within the same task. We presented this task to 169 adults (ages 18–80), assessed working memory and fluid intelligence, and measured brain volumes of regions that were deemed relevant to th...

  7. Acoustic and semantic interference effects in words and pictures.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dhawan, M; Pellegrino, J W

    1977-05-01

    Interference effects for pictures and words were investigated using a probe-recall task. Word stimuli showed acoustic interference effects for items at the end of the list and semantic interference effects for items at the beginning of the list, similar to results of Kintsch and Buschke (1969). Picture stimuli showed large semantic interference effects at all list positions with smaller acoustic interference effects. The results were related to latency data on picture-word processing and interpreted in terms of the differential order, probability, and/or speed of access to acoustic and semantic levels of processing. A levels of processing explanation of picture-word retention differences was related to dual coding theory. Both theoretical positions converge on an explanation of picture-word retention differences as a function of the relative capacity for semantic or associative processing.

  8. Episodic and semantic content of memory and imagination: A multilevel analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Devitt, Aleea L; Addis, Donna Rose; Schacter, Daniel L

    2017-10-01

    Autobiographical memories of past events and imaginations of future scenarios comprise both episodic and semantic content. Correlating the amount of "internal" (episodic) and "external" (semantic) details generated when describing autobiographical events can illuminate the relationship between the processes supporting these constructs. Yet previous studies performing such correlations were limited by aggregating data across all events generated by an individual, potentially obscuring the underlying relationship within the events themselves. In the current article, we reanalyzed datasets from eight studies using a multilevel approach, allowing us to explore the relationship between internal and external details within events. We also examined whether this relationship changes with healthy aging. Our reanalyses demonstrated a largely negative relationship between the internal and external details produced when describing autobiographical memories and future imaginations. This negative relationship was stronger and more consistent for older adults and was evident both in direct and indirect measures of semantic content. Moreover, this relationship appears to be specific to episodic tasks, as no relationship was observed for a nonepisodic picture description task. This negative association suggests that people do not generate semantic information indiscriminately, but do so in a compensatory manner, to embellish episodically impoverished events. Our reanalysis further lends support for dissociable processes underpinning episodic and semantic information generation when remembering and imagining autobiographical events.

  9. Spontaneous Gender Categorization in Masking and Priming Studies: Key for Distinguishing Jane from John Doe but Not Madonna from Sinatra

    Science.gov (United States)

    Habibi, Ruth; Khurana, Beena

    2012-01-01

    Facial recognition is key to social interaction, however with unfamiliar faces only generic information, in the form of facial stereotypes such as gender and age is available. Therefore is generic information more prominent in unfamiliar versus familiar face processing? In order to address the question we tapped into two relatively disparate stages of face processing. At the early stages of encoding, we employed perceptual masking to reveal that only perception of unfamiliar face targets is affected by the gender of the facial masks. At the semantic end; using a priming paradigm, we found that while to-be-ignored unfamiliar faces prime lexical decisions to gender congruent stereotypic words, familiar faces do not. Our findings indicate that gender is a more salient dimension in unfamiliar relative to familiar face processing, both in early perceptual stages as well as later semantic stages of person construal. PMID:22389697

  10. TurkPrime.com: A versatile crowdsourcing data acquisition platform for the behavioral sciences.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Litman, Leib; Robinson, Jonathan; Abberbock, Tzvi

    2017-04-01

    In recent years, Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has revolutionized social science by providing a way to collect behavioral data with unprecedented speed and efficiency. However, MTurk was not intended to be a research tool, and many common research tasks are difficult and time-consuming to implement as a result. TurkPrime was designed as a research platform that integrates with MTurk and supports tasks that are common to the social and behavioral sciences. Like MTurk, TurkPrime is an Internet-based platform that runs on any browser and does not require any downloads or installation. Tasks that can be implemented with TurkPrime include: excluding participants on the basis of previous participation, longitudinal studies, making changes to a study while it is running, automating the approval process, increasing the speed of data collection, sending bulk e-mails and bonuses, enhancing communication with participants, monitoring dropout and engagement rates, providing enhanced sampling options, and many others. This article describes how TurkPrime saves time and resources, improves data quality, and allows researchers to design and implement studies that were previously very difficult or impossible to carry out on MTurk. TurkPrime is designed as a research tool whose aim is to improve the quality of the crowdsourcing data collection process. Various features have been and continue to be implemented on the basis of feedback from the research community. TurkPrime is a free research platform.

  11. A Brighter Side to Memory Illusions: False Memories Prime Children's and Adults' Insight-Based Problem Solving

    Science.gov (United States)

    Howe, Mark L.; Garner, Sarah R.; Charlesworth, Monica; Knott, Lauren

    2011-01-01

    Can false memories have a positive consequence on human cognition? In two experiments, we investigated whether false memories could prime insight problem-solving tasks. Children and adults were asked to solve compound remote associate task (CRAT) problems, half of which had been primed by the presentation of Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists…

  12. Semantic similarity measure in biomedical domain leverage web search engine.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Chi-Huang; Hsieh, Sheau-Ling; Weng, Yung-Ching; Chang, Wen-Yung; Lai, Feipei

    2010-01-01

    Semantic similarity measure plays an essential role in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. In this paper we propose a page-count-based semantic similarity measure and apply it in biomedical domains. Previous researches in semantic web related applications have deployed various semantic similarity measures. Despite the usefulness of the measurements in those applications, measuring semantic similarity between two terms remains a challenge task. The proposed method exploits page counts returned by the Web Search Engine. We define various similarity scores for two given terms P and Q, using the page counts for querying P, Q and P AND Q. Moreover, we propose a novel approach to compute semantic similarity using lexico-syntactic patterns with page counts. These different similarity scores are integrated adapting support vector machines, to leverage the robustness of semantic similarity measures. Experimental results on two datasets achieve correlation coefficients of 0.798 on the dataset provided by A. Hliaoutakis, 0.705 on the dataset provide by T. Pedersen with physician scores and 0.496 on the dataset provided by T. Pedersen et al. with expert scores.

  13. A Framework for Automatic Web Service Discovery Based on Semantics and NLP Techniques

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Asma Adala

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available As a greater number of Web Services are made available today, automatic discovery is recognized as an important task. To promote the automation of service discovery, different semantic languages have been created that allow describing the functionality of services in a machine interpretable form using Semantic Web technologies. The problem is that users do not have intimate knowledge about semantic Web service languages and related toolkits. In this paper, we propose a discovery framework that enables semantic Web service discovery based on keywords written in natural language. We describe a novel approach for automatic discovery of semantic Web services which employs Natural Language Processing techniques to match a user request, expressed in natural language, with a semantic Web service description. Additionally, we present an efficient semantic matching technique to compute the semantic distance between ontological concepts.

  14. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Semantic Memory as a Presymptomatic Biomarker of Alzheimer’s Disease Risk

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sugarman, Michael A.; Woodard, John L.; Nielson, Kristy A.; Seidenberg, Michael; Smith, J. Carson; Durgerian, Sally; Rao, Stephen M.

    2011-01-01

    Extensive research efforts have been directed toward strategies for predicting risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) prior to the appearance of observable symptoms. Existing approaches for early detection of AD vary in terms of their efficacy, invasiveness, and ease of implementation. Several non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging strategies have been developed for predicting decline in cognitively healthy older adults. This review will survey a number of studies, beginning with the development of a famous name discrimination task used to identify neural regions that participate in semantic memory retrieval and to test predictions of several key theories of the role of the hippocampus in memory. This task has revealed medial temporal and neocortical contributions to recent and remote memory retrieval, and it has been used to demonstrate compensatory neural recruitment in older adults, apolipoprotein E ε4 carriers, and amnestic mild cognitive impairment patients. Recently, we have also found that the famous name discrimination task provides predictive value for forecasting episodic memory decline among asymptomatic older adults. Other studies investigating the predictive value of semantic memory tasks will also be presented. We suggest several advantages associated with the use of semantic processing tasks, particularly those based on person identification, in comparison to episodic memory tasks to study AD risk. Future directions for research and potential clinical uses of semantic memory paradigms are also discussed. PMID:21996618

  15. Semantic web for the working ontologist effective modeling in RDFS and OWL

    CERN Document Server

    Allemang, Dean

    2011-01-01

    Semantic Web models and technologies provide information in machine-readable languages that enable computers to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks automatically without the direction of users. These technologies are relatively recent and advancing rapidly, creating a set of unique challenges for those developing applications. Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist is the essential, comprehensive resource on semantic modeling, for practitioners in health care, artificial intelligence, finance, engineering, military intelligence, enterprise architecture, and more. Focused on

  16. Independent priming of location and color in identification of briefly presented letters.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ásgeirsson, Árni Gunnar; Kristjánsson, Árni; Bundesen, Claus

    2014-01-01

    Attention shifts are facilitated if the items to be attended remain the same across trials. Some researchers argue that this priming effect is perceptual, whereas others propose that priming is postperceptual, involving facilitated response selection. The experimental findings have not been consistent regarding the roles of variables such as task difficulty, response repetition, expectancies, and decision-making. Position priming, when repetition of a target position facilitates responses on a subsequent trial, is another source of disagreement among researchers. Experimental results have likewise been inconsistent as to whether position priming is dependent on the repetition of target features or has an independent effect on attention shifts. We attempted to isolate the perceptual components of priming by presenting brief (10-180 ms) search arrays to eight healthy observers. The task was to identify a color-singleton letter among distractors. All stimulus presentation contingencies were randomized, and responses were unspeeded, to avoid effects of observer expectation and postperceptual effects. Repeating target color and/or position strongly improved performance. The effects of color and position repetition were independent of one another and were stable across participants. The results argue for a strong perceptual component in priming, which biases selection toward recent target features and positions, showing that perceptual mechanisms are sufficient to produce priming in visual search and that such effects can be elicited with limited sensory evidence. The results are the first to demonstrate independent priming of color and position in the identification of briefly presented, postmasked stimuli.

  17. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of semantic memory as a presymptomatic biomarker of Alzheimer's disease risk.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sugarman, Michael A; Woodard, John L; Nielson, Kristy A; Seidenberg, Michael; Smith, J Carson; Durgerian, Sally; Rao, Stephen M

    2012-03-01

    Extensive research efforts have been directed toward strategies for predicting risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) prior to the appearance of observable symptoms. Existing approaches for early detection of AD vary in terms of their efficacy, invasiveness, and ease of implementation. Several non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging strategies have been developed for predicting decline in cognitively healthy older adults. This review will survey a number of studies, beginning with the development of a famous name discrimination task used to identify neural regions that participate in semantic memory retrieval and to test predictions of several key theories of the role of the hippocampus in memory. This task has revealed medial temporal and neocortical contributions to recent and remote memory retrieval, and it has been used to demonstrate compensatory neural recruitment in older adults, apolipoprotein E ε4 carriers, and amnestic mild cognitive impairment patients. Recently, we have also found that the famous name discrimination task provides predictive value for forecasting episodic memory decline among asymptomatic older adults. Other studies investigating the predictive value of semantic memory tasks will also be presented. We suggest several advantages associated with the use of semantic processing tasks, particularly those based on person identification, in comparison to episodic memory tasks to study AD risk. Future directions for research and potential clinical uses of semantic memory paradigms are also discussed. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Imaging Brain Aging and Neurodegenerative disease. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  18. Comparing different kinds of words and word-word relations to test an habituation model of priming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rieth, Cory A; Huber, David E

    2017-06-01

    Huber and O'Reilly (2003) proposed that neural habituation exists to solve a temporal parsing problem, minimizing blending between one word and the next when words are visually presented in rapid succession. They developed a neural dynamics habituation model, explaining the finding that short duration primes produce positive priming whereas long duration primes produce negative repetition priming. The model contains three layers of processing, including a visual input layer, an orthographic layer, and a lexical-semantic layer. The predicted effect of prime duration depends both on this assumed representational hierarchy and the assumption that synaptic depression underlies habituation. The current study tested these assumptions by comparing different kinds of words (e.g., words versus non-words) and different kinds of word-word relations (e.g., associative versus repetition). For each experiment, the predictions of the original model were compared to an alternative model with different representational assumptions. Experiment 1 confirmed the prediction that non-words and inverted words require longer prime durations to eliminate positive repetition priming (i.e., a slower transition from positive to negative priming). Experiment 2 confirmed the prediction that associative priming increases and then decreases with increasing prime duration, but remains positive even with long duration primes. Experiment 3 replicated the effects of repetition and associative priming using a within-subjects design and combined these effects by examining target words that were expected to repeat (e.g., viewing the target word 'BACK' after the prime phrase 'back to'). These results support the originally assumed representational hierarchy and more generally the role of habituation in temporal parsing and priming. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  19. The effect of a prospected reward on semantic processing : An N400 EEG study

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    van der Ven, Sanne H. G.; van Touw, Sven A. C.; van Hoogmoed, Anne H.; Janssen, Eva M.; Leseman, Paul P. M.

    2016-01-01

    Promised rewards are often used in education to stimulate learning behaviour. The present study tested whether a reward prospect affects semantic processing and recall of learned materials. Thirty-nine females participated in an electroencephalogram (EEG) task measuring semantic processing using the

  20. The effect of unimodal affective priming on dichotic emotion recognition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Voyer, Daniel; Myles, Daniel

    2017-11-15

    The present report concerns two experiments extending to unimodal priming the cross-modal priming effects observed with auditory emotions by Harding and Voyer [(2016). Laterality effects in cross-modal affective priming. Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, 21, 585-605]. Experiment 1 used binaural targets to establish the presence of the priming effect and Experiment 2 used dichotically presented targets to examine auditory asymmetries. In Experiment 1, 82 university students completed a task in which binaural targets consisting of one of 4 English words inflected in one of 4 emotional tones were preceded by binaural primes consisting of one of 4 Mandarin words pronounced in the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) emotional tones. Trials where the prime emotion was congruent with the target emotion showed faster responses and higher accuracy in identifying the target emotion. In Experiment 2, 60 undergraduate students participated and the target was presented dichotically instead of binaurally. Primes congruent with the left ear produced a large left ear advantage, whereas right congruent primes produced a right ear advantage. These results indicate that unimodal priming produces stronger effects than those observed under cross-modal priming. The findings suggest that priming should likely be considered a strong top-down influence on laterality effects.

  1. Preparatory neural activity predicts performance on a conflict task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stern, Emily R; Wager, Tor D; Egner, Tobias; Hirsch, Joy; Mangels, Jennifer A

    2007-10-24

    Advance preparation has been shown to improve the efficiency of conflict resolution. Yet, with little empirical work directly linking preparatory neural activity to the performance benefits of advance cueing, it is not clear whether this relationship results from preparatory activation of task-specific networks, or from activity associated with general alerting processes. Here, fMRI data were acquired during a spatial Stroop task in which advance cues either informed subjects of the upcoming relevant feature of conflict stimuli (spatial or semantic) or were neutral. Informative cues decreased reaction time (RT) relative to neutral cues, and cues indicating that spatial information would be task-relevant elicited greater activity than neutral cues in multiple areas, including right anterior prefrontal and bilateral parietal cortex. Additionally, preparatory activation in bilateral parietal cortex and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex predicted faster RT when subjects responded to spatial location. No regions were found to be specific to semantic cues at conventional thresholds, and lowering the threshold further revealed little overlap between activity associated with spatial and semantic cueing effects, thereby demonstrating a single dissociation between activations related to preparing a spatial versus semantic task-set. This relationship between preparatory activation of spatial processing networks and efficient conflict resolution suggests that advance information can benefit performance by leading to domain-specific biasing of task-relevant information.

  2. Semantic Drift in Espresso-style Bootstrapping: Graph-theoretic Analysis and Evaluation in Word Sense Disambiguation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Komachi, Mamoru; Kudo, Taku; Shimbo, Masashi; Matsumoto, Yuji

    Bootstrapping has a tendency, called semantic drift, to select instances unrelated to the seed instances as the iteration proceeds. We demonstrate the semantic drift of Espresso-style bootstrapping has the same root as the topic drift of Kleinberg's HITS, using a simplified graph-based reformulation of bootstrapping. We confirm that two graph-based algorithms, the von Neumann kernels and the regularized Laplacian, can reduce the effect of semantic drift in the task of word sense disambiguation (WSD) on Senseval-3 English Lexical Sample Task. Proposed algorithms achieve superior performance to Espresso and previous graph-based WSD methods, even though the proposed algorithms have less parameters and are easy to calibrate.

  3. Argument structure and the representation of abstract semantics.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Javier Rodríguez-Ferreiro

    Full Text Available According to the dual coding theory, differences in the ease of retrieval between concrete and abstract words are related to the exclusive dependence of abstract semantics on linguistic information. Argument structure can be considered a measure of the complexity of the linguistic contexts that accompany a verb. If the retrieval of abstract verbs relies more on the linguistic codes they are associated to, we could expect a larger effect of argument structure for the processing of abstract verbs. In this study, sets of length- and frequency-matched verbs including 40 intransitive verbs, 40 transitive verbs taking simple complements, and 40 transitive verbs taking sentential complements were presented in separate lexical and grammatical decision tasks. Half of the verbs were concrete and half were abstract. Similar results were obtained in the two tasks, with significant effects of imageability and transitivity. However, the interaction between these two variables was not significant. These results conflict with hypotheses assuming a stronger reliance of abstract semantics on linguistic codes. In contrast, our data are in line with theories that link the ease of retrieval with availability and robustness of semantic information.

  4. Argument structure and the representation of abstract semantics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rodríguez-Ferreiro, Javier; Andreu, Llorenç; Sanz-Torrent, Mònica

    2014-01-01

    According to the dual coding theory, differences in the ease of retrieval between concrete and abstract words are related to the exclusive dependence of abstract semantics on linguistic information. Argument structure can be considered a measure of the complexity of the linguistic contexts that accompany a verb. If the retrieval of abstract verbs relies more on the linguistic codes they are associated to, we could expect a larger effect of argument structure for the processing of abstract verbs. In this study, sets of length- and frequency-matched verbs including 40 intransitive verbs, 40 transitive verbs taking simple complements, and 40 transitive verbs taking sentential complements were presented in separate lexical and grammatical decision tasks. Half of the verbs were concrete and half were abstract. Similar results were obtained in the two tasks, with significant effects of imageability and transitivity. However, the interaction between these two variables was not significant. These results conflict with hypotheses assuming a stronger reliance of abstract semantics on linguistic codes. In contrast, our data are in line with theories that link the ease of retrieval with availability and robustness of semantic information.

  5. Dynamic switching between semantic and episodic memory systems.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kompus, Kristiina; Olsson, Carl-Johan; Larsson, Anne; Nyberg, Lars

    2009-09-01

    It has been suggested that episodic and semantic long-term memory systems interact during retrieval. Here we examined the flexibility of memory retrieval in an associative task taxing memories of different strength, assumed to differentially engage episodic and semantic memory. Healthy volunteers were pre-trained on a set of 36 face-name pairs over a 6-week period. Another set of 36 items was shown only once during the same time period. About 3 months after the training period all items were presented in a randomly intermixed order in an event-related fMRI study of face-name memory. Once presented items differentially activated anterior cingulate cortex and a right prefrontal region that previously have been associated with episodic retrieval mode. High-familiar items were associated with stronger activation of posterior cortices and a left frontal region. These findings fit a model of memory retrieval by which early processes determine, on a trial-by-trial basis, if the task can be solved by the default semantic system. If not, there is a dynamic shift to cognitive control processes that guide retrieval from episodic memory.

  6. The semantic basis of taste-shape associations

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Carlos Velasco

    2016-02-01

    Full Text Available Previous research shows that people systematically match tastes with shapes. Here, we assess the extent to which matched taste and shape stimuli share a common semantic space and whether semantically congruent versus incongruent taste/shape associations can influence the speed with which people respond to both shapes and taste words. In Experiment 1, semantic differentiation was used to assess the semantic space of both taste words and shapes. The results suggest a common semantic space containing two principal components (seemingly, intensity and hedonics and two principal clusters, one including round shapes and the taste word “sweet,” and the other including angular shapes and the taste words “salty,” “sour,” and “bitter.” The former cluster appears more positively-valenced whilst less potent than the latter. In Experiment 2, two speeded classification tasks assessed whether congruent versus incongruent mappings of stimuli and responses (e.g., sweet with round versus sweet with angular would influence the speed of participants’ responding, to both shapes and taste words. The results revealed an overall effect of congruence with congruent trials yielding faster responses than their incongruent counterparts. These results are consistent with previous evidence suggesting a close relation (or crossmodal correspondence between tastes and shape curvature that may derive from common semantic coding, perhaps along the intensity and hedonic dimensions.

  7. Functional dissociations in top-down control dependent neural repetition priming.

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Klaver, P.; Schnaidt, M.; Fell, J.; Ruhlmann, J.; Elger, C.E.; Fernandez, G.S.E.

    2007-01-01

    Little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying top-down control of repetition priming. Here, we use functional brain imaging to investigate these mechanisms. Study and repetition tasks used a natural/man-made forced choice task. In the study phase subjects were required to respond to either

  8. Priming of disability and elderly stereotype in motor performance: similar or specific effects?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ginsberg, Frederik; Rohmer, Odile; Louvet, Eva

    2012-04-01

    In three experimental studies, the effects of priming participants with the disability stereotype were investigated with respect to their subsequent motor performance. Also explored were effects of activating two similar stereotypes, persons with a disability and elderly people. In Study 1, participants were primed with the disability stereotype versus with a neutral prime, and then asked to perform on a motor coordination task. In Studies 2 and 3, a third condition was introduced: priming participants with the elderly stereotype. Results indicated that priming participants with the disability stereotype altered their motor performance: they showed decreased manual dexterity and performed slower than the non-primed participants. Priming with the elderly stereotype decreased only performance speed. These findings underline that prime-to-behavior effects may depend on activation of specific stereotype content.

  9. Bilingual language control and general purpose cognitive control among individuals with bilingual aphasia: evidence based on negative priming and flanker tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dash, Tanya; Kar, Bhoomika R

    2014-01-01

    Bilingualism results in an added advantage with respect to cognitive control. The interaction between bilingual language control and general purpose cognitive control systems can also be understood by studying executive control among individuals with bilingual aphasia. objectives: The current study examined the subcomponents of cognitive control in bilingual aphasia. A case study approach was used to investigate whether cognitive control and language control are two separate systems and how factors related to bilingualism interact with control processes. Four individuals with bilingual aphasia performed a language background questionnaire, picture description task, and two experimental tasks (nonlinguistic negative priming task and linguistic and nonlinguistic versions of flanker task). A descriptive approach was used to analyse the data using reaction time and accuracy measures. The cumulative distribution function plots were used to visualize the variations in performance across conditions. The results highlight the distinction between general purpose cognitive control and bilingual language control mechanisms. All participants showed predominant use of the reactive control mechanism to compensate for the limited resources system. Independent yet interactive systems for bilingual language control and general purpose cognitive control were postulated based on the experimental data derived from individuals with bilingual aphasia.

  10. Modulation of the semantic system by word imageability.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sabsevitz, D S; Medler, D A; Seidenberg, M; Binder, J R

    2005-08-01

    A prevailing neurobiological theory of semantic memory proposes that part of our knowledge about concrete, highly imageable concepts is stored in the form of sensory-motor representations. While this theory predicts differential activation of the semantic system by concrete and abstract words, previous functional imaging studies employing this contrast have provided relatively little supporting evidence. We acquired event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants performed a semantic similarity judgment task on a large number of concrete and abstract noun triads. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the degree to which the words in the triad were similar in meaning. Concrete nouns, relative to abstract nouns, produced greater activation in a bilateral network of multimodal and heteromodal association areas, including ventral and medial temporal, posterior-inferior parietal, dorsal prefrontal, and posterior cingulate cortex. In contrast, abstract nouns produced greater activation almost exclusively in the left hemisphere in superior temporal and inferior frontal cortex. Increasing task difficulty modulated activation mainly in attention, working memory, and response monitoring systems, with almost no effect on areas that were modulated by imageability. These data provide critical support for the hypothesis that concrete, imageable concepts activate perceptually based representations not available to abstract concepts. In contrast, processing abstract concepts makes greater demands on left perisylvian phonological and lexical retrieval systems. The findings are compatible with dual coding theory and less consistent with single-code models of conceptual representation. The lack of overlap between imageability and task difficulty effects suggests that once the neural representation of a concept is activated, further maintenance and manipulation of that information in working memory does not further increase neural activation in

  11. Role of consciousness in temporal integration of semantic information.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yang, Yung-Hao; Tien, Yung-Hsuan; Yang, Pei-Ling; Yeh, Su-Ling

    2017-10-01

    Previous studies found that word meaning can be processed unconsciously. Yet it remains unknown whether temporally segregated words can be integrated into a holistic meaningful phrase without consciousness. The first four experiments were designed to examine this by sequentially presenting the first three words of Chinese four-word idioms as prime to one eye and dynamic Mondrians to the other (i.e., the continuous flash suppression paradigm; CFS). An unmasked target word followed the three masked words in a lexical decision task. Results from such invisible (CFS) condition were compared with the visible condition where the preceding words were superimposed on the Mondrians and presented to both eyes. Lower performance in behavioral experiments and larger N400 event-related potentials (ERP) component for incongruent- than congruent-ending words were found in the visible condition. However, no such congruency effect was found in the invisible condition, even with enhanced statistical power and top-down attention, and with several potential confounding factors (contrast-dependent processing, long interval, no conscious training) excluded. Experiment 5 demonstrated that familiarity of word orientation without temporal integration can be processed unconsciously, excluding the possibility of general insensitivity of our paradigm. The overall result pattern therefore suggests that consciousness plays an important role in semantic temporal integration in the conditions we tested.

  12. GIF Video Sentiment Detection Using Semantic Sequence

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Dazhen Lin

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available With the development of social media, an increasing number of people use short videos in social media applications to express their opinions and sentiments. However, sentiment detection of short videos is a very challenging task because of the semantic gap problem and sequence based sentiment understanding problem. In this context, we propose a SentiPair Sequence based GIF video sentiment detection approach with two contributions. First, we propose a Synset Forest method to extract sentiment related semantic concepts from WordNet to build a robust SentiPair label set. This approach considers the semantic gap between label words and selects a robust label subset which is related to sentiment. Secondly, we propose a SentiPair Sequence based GIF video sentiment detection approach that learns the semantic sequence to understand the sentiment from GIF videos. Our experiment results on GSO-2016 (GIF Sentiment Ontology data show that our approach not only outperforms four state-of-the-art classification methods but also shows better performance than the state-of-the-art middle level sentiment ontology features, Adjective Noun Pairs (ANPs.

  13. Semantic Blogging : Spreading the Semantic Web Meme

    OpenAIRE

    Cayzer, Steve

    2004-01-01

    This paper is about semantic blogging, an application of the semantic web to blogging. The semantic web promises to make the web more useful by endowing metadata with machine processable semantics. Blogging is a lightweight web publishing paradigm which provides a very low barrier to entry, useful syndication and aggregation behaviour, a simple to understand structure and decentralized construction of a rich information network. Semantic blogging builds upon the success and clear network valu...

  14. Emotional verbal fluency: a new task on emotion and executive function interaction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sass, Katharina; Fetz, Karolina; Oetken, Sarah; Habel, Ute; Heim, Stefan

    2013-09-01

    The present study introduces "Emotional Verbal Fluency" as a novel (partially computerized) task, which is aimed to investigate the interaction between emotionally loaded words and executive functions. Verbal fluency tasks are thought to measure executive functions but the interaction with emotional aspects is hardly investigated. In the current study, a group of healthy subjects (n = 21, mean age 25 years, 76% females) were asked to generate items that are either part of a semantic category (e.g., plants, toys, vehicles; standard semantic verbal fluency) or can trigger the emotions joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The results of the task revealed no differences between performance on semantic and emotional categories, suggesting a comparable task difficulty for healthy subjects. Hence, these first results on the comparison between semantic and emotional verbal fluency seem to highlight that both might be suitable for examining executive functioning. However, an interaction was found between the category type and repetition (first vs. second sequence of the same category) with larger performance decrease for semantic in comparison to emotional categories. Best performance overall was found for the emotional category "joy" suggesting a positivity bias in healthy subjects. To conclude, emotional verbal fluency is a promising approach to investigate emotional components in an executive task, which may stimulate further research, especially in psychiatric patients who suffer from emotional as well as cognitive deficits.

  15. Emotional Verbal Fluency: A New Task on Emotion and Executive Function Interaction

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sarah Oetken

    2013-07-01

    Full Text Available The present study introduces “Emotional Verbal Fluency” as a novel (partially computerized task, which is aimed to investigate the interaction between emotionally loaded words and executive functions. Verbal fluency tasks are thought to measure executive functions but the interaction with emotional aspects is hardly investigated. In the current study, a group of healthy subjects (n = 21, mean age 25 years, 76% females were asked to generate items that are either part of a semantic category (e.g., plants, toys, vehicles; standard semantic verbal fluency or can trigger the emotions joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The results of the task revealed no differences between performance on semantic and emotional categories, suggesting a comparable task difficulty for healthy subjects. Hence, these first results on the comparison between semantic and emotional verbal fluency seem to highlight that both might be suitable for examining executive functioning. However, an interaction was found between the category type and repetition (first vs. second sequence of the same category with larger performance decrease for semantic in comparison to emotional categories. Best performance overall was found for the emotional category “joy” suggesting a positivity bias in healthy subjects. To conclude, emotional verbal fluency is a promising approach to investigate emotional components in an executive task, which may stimulate further research, especially in psychiatric patients who suffer from emotional as well as cognitive deficits.

  16. Supporting open collaboration in science through explicit and linked semantic description of processes

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gil, Yolanda; Michel, Felix; Ratnakar, Varun; Read, Jordan S.; Hauder, Matheus; Duffy, Christopher; Hanson, Paul C.; Dugan, Hilary

    2015-01-01

    The Web was originally developed to support collaboration in science. Although scientists benefit from many forms of collaboration on the Web (e.g., blogs, wikis, forums, code sharing, etc.), most collaborative projects are coordinated over email, phone calls, and in-person meetings. Our goal is to develop a collaborative infrastructure for scientists to work on complex science questions that require multi-disciplinary contributions to gather and analyze data, that cannot occur without significant coordination to synthesize findings, and that grow organically to accommodate new contributors as needed as the work evolves over time. Our approach is to develop an organic data science framework based on a task-centered organization of the collaboration, includes principles from social sciences for successful on-line communities, and exposes an open science process. Our approach is implemented as an extension of a semantic wiki platform, and captures formal representations of task decomposition structures, relations between tasks and users, and other properties of tasks, data, and other relevant science objects. All these entities are captured through the semantic wiki user interface, represented as semantic web objects, and exported as linked data.

  17. Alcohol Primes, Expectancies, and the Working Self-Concept

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hicks, Joshua A.; Schlegel, Rebecca J.; Friedman, Ronald S.; McCarthy, Denis M.

    2016-01-01

    Previous research has shown that alcohol consumption can lead to momentary changes in the self-concept (e.g., Steele & Josephs, 1990). In two studies (n = 150), we examined whether the implicit activation of alcohol expectancies (i.e., sociability-related expectancies) would also lead to changes in self-perception. To test this idea, participants first completed a measure of sociability-related alcohol expectancies. In a subsequent laboratory session, participants were exposed to either alcohol-related primes (i.e., pictures or words associated with alcohol) or neutral primes. After the priming task, participants completed an ostensibly unrelated self-concept survey that contained words related to sociability (e.g., “outgoing”) and non-sociability related words (e.g., “clever”). For both studies, results revealed that sociability-related alcohol expectancies were positively associated with sociability-related self-concept ratings for participants exposed to alcohol primes, but not for participants exposed to the neutral primes. Implications for the role implicit self-concept activation may have on drinking behaviors are discussed. PMID:19769437

  18. Neural correlates of rhyming vs. lexical and semantic fluency.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kircher, Tilo; Nagels, Arne; Kirner-Veselinovic, André; Krach, Sören

    2011-05-19

    Rhyming words, as in songs or poems, is a universal feature of human language across all ages. In the present fMRI study a novel overt rhyming task was applied to determine the neural correlates of rhyme production. Fifteen right-handed healthy male volunteers participated in this verbal fluency study. Participants were instructed to overtly articulate as many words as possible either to a given initial letter (LVF) or to a semantic category (SVF). During the rhyming verbal fluency task (RVF), participants had to generate words that rhymed with pseudoword stimuli. On-line overt verbal responses were audiotaped in order to correct the imaging results for the number of generated words. Fewer words were generated in the rhyming compared to both the lexical and the semantic condition. On a neural level, all language tasks activated a language network encompassing the left inferior frontal gyrus, the middle and superior temporal gyri as well as the contralateral right cerebellum. Rhyming verbal fluency compared to both lexical and semantic verbal fluency demonstrated significantly stronger activation of left inferior parietal region. Generating novel rhyme words seems to be mainly mediated by the left inferior parietal lobe, a region previously found to be associated with meta-phonological as well as sub-lexical linguistic processes. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  19. Biomedical semantics in the Semantic Web.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Splendiani, Andrea; Burger, Albert; Paschke, Adrian; Romano, Paolo; Marshall, M Scott

    2011-03-07

    The Semantic Web offers an ideal platform for representing and linking biomedical information, which is a prerequisite for the development and application of analytical tools to address problems in data-intensive areas such as systems biology and translational medicine. As for any new paradigm, the adoption of the Semantic Web offers opportunities and poses questions and challenges to the life sciences scientific community: which technologies in the Semantic Web stack will be more beneficial for the life sciences? Is biomedical information too complex to benefit from simple interlinked representations? What are the implications of adopting a new paradigm for knowledge representation? What are the incentives for the adoption of the Semantic Web, and who are the facilitators? Is there going to be a Semantic Web revolution in the life sciences?We report here a few reflections on these questions, following discussions at the SWAT4LS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences) workshop series, of which this Journal of Biomedical Semantics special issue presents selected papers from the 2009 edition, held in Amsterdam on November 20th.

  20. Selective Audiovisual Semantic Integration Enabled by Feature-Selective Attention.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Yuanqing; Long, Jinyi; Huang, Biao; Yu, Tianyou; Wu, Wei; Li, Peijun; Fang, Fang; Sun, Pei

    2016-01-13

    An audiovisual object may contain multiple semantic features, such as the gender and emotional features of the speaker. Feature-selective attention and audiovisual semantic integration are two brain functions involved in the recognition of audiovisual objects. Humans often selectively attend to one or several features while ignoring the other features of an audiovisual object. Meanwhile, the human brain integrates semantic information from the visual and auditory modalities. However, how these two brain functions correlate with each other remains to be elucidated. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we explored the neural mechanism by which feature-selective attention modulates audiovisual semantic integration. During the fMRI experiment, the subjects were presented with visual-only, auditory-only, or audiovisual dynamical facial stimuli and performed several feature-selective attention tasks. Our results revealed that a distribution of areas, including heteromodal areas and brain areas encoding attended features, may be involved in audiovisual semantic integration. Through feature-selective attention, the human brain may selectively integrate audiovisual semantic information from attended features by enhancing functional connectivity and thus regulating information flows from heteromodal areas to brain areas encoding the attended features.

  1. Developmental differences in masked form priming are not driven by vocabulary growth.

    OpenAIRE

    Adeetee eBhide; Bradley L Schlaggar; Kelly Anne Barnes

    2014-01-01

    As children develop into skilled readers, they are able to more quickly and accurately distinguish between words with similar visual forms (i.e., they develop precise lexical representations). The masked form priming lexical decision task is used to test the precision of lexical representations. In this paradigm, a prime (which differs by one letter from the target) is briefly flashed before the target is presented. Participants make a lexical decision to the target. Primes can facilitate rea...

  2. Stereotype Priming in Face Recognition: Interactions between Semantic and Visual Information in Face Encoding

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hills, Peter J.; Lewis, Michael B.; Honey, R. C.

    2008-01-01

    The accuracy with which previously unfamiliar faces are recognised is increased by the presentation of a stereotype-congruent occupation label [Klatzky, R. L., Martin, G. L., & Kane, R. A. (1982a). "Semantic interpretation effects on memory for faces." "Memory & Cognition," 10, 195-206; Klatzky, R. L., Martin, G. L., & Kane, R. A. (1982b).…

  3. The Metamemory Approach to Confidence: A Test Using Semantic Memory

    Science.gov (United States)

    Brewer, William F.; Sampaio, Cristina

    2012-01-01

    The metamemory approach to memory confidence was extended and elaborated to deal with semantic memory tasks. The metamemory approach assumes that memory confidence is based on the products and processes of a completed memory task, as well as metamemory beliefs that individuals have about how their memory products and processes relate to memory…

  4. Behavioral semantics of learning and crossmodal processing in auditory cortex: the semantic processor concept.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Scheich, Henning; Brechmann, André; Brosch, Michael; Budinger, Eike; Ohl, Frank W; Selezneva, Elena; Stark, Holger; Tischmeyer, Wolfgang; Wetzel, Wolfram

    2011-01-01

    Two phenomena of auditory cortex activity have recently attracted attention, namely that the primary field can show different types of learning-related changes of sound representation and that during learning even this early auditory cortex is under strong multimodal influence. Based on neuronal recordings in animal auditory cortex during instrumental tasks, in this review we put forward the hypothesis that these two phenomena serve to derive the task-specific meaning of sounds by associative learning. To understand the implications of this tenet, it is helpful to realize how a behavioral meaning is usually derived for novel environmental sounds. For this purpose, associations with other sensory, e.g. visual, information are mandatory to develop a connection between a sound and its behaviorally relevant cause and/or the context of sound occurrence. This makes it plausible that in instrumental tasks various non-auditory sensory and procedural contingencies of sound generation become co-represented by neuronal firing in auditory cortex. Information related to reward or to avoidance of discomfort during task learning, that is essentially non-auditory, is also co-represented. The reinforcement influence points to the dopaminergic internal reward system, the local role of which for memory consolidation in auditory cortex is well-established. Thus, during a trial of task performance, the neuronal responses to the sounds are embedded in a sequence of representations of such non-auditory information. The embedded auditory responses show task-related modulations of auditory responses falling into types that correspond to three basic logical classifications that may be performed with a perceptual item, i.e. from simple detection to discrimination, and categorization. This hierarchy of classifications determine the semantic "same-different" relationships among sounds. Different cognitive classifications appear to be a consequence of learning task and lead to a recruitment of

  5. Encouraging Use of Subordination in Children's Narratives: A Classroom-Based Priming Study

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hesketh, Anne; Serratrice, Ludovica; Ashworth, Rachel

    2016-01-01

    This study investigated the long-term effect of classroom-based input manipulation on children's use of subordination in a story re-telling task; it also explored the role of receptive vocabulary skills and expressive grammatical abilities in predicting the likelihood of priming. During a two-week priming phase, 47 monolingual English-speaking…

  6. Enhancing biomedical text summarization using semantic relation extraction.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yue Shang

    Full Text Available Automatic text summarization for a biomedical concept can help researchers to get the key points of a certain topic from large amount of biomedical literature efficiently. In this paper, we present a method for generating text summary for a given biomedical concept, e.g., H1N1 disease, from multiple documents based on semantic relation extraction. Our approach includes three stages: 1 We extract semantic relations in each sentence using the semantic knowledge representation tool SemRep. 2 We develop a relation-level retrieval method to select the relations most relevant to each query concept and visualize them in a graphic representation. 3 For relations in the relevant set, we extract informative sentences that can interpret them from the document collection to generate text summary using an information retrieval based method. Our major focus in this work is to investigate the contribution of semantic relation extraction to the task of biomedical text summarization. The experimental results on summarization for a set of diseases show that the introduction of semantic knowledge improves the performance and our results are better than the MEAD system, a well-known tool for text summarization.

  7. Enhancing biomedical text summarization using semantic relation extraction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shang, Yue; Li, Yanpeng; Lin, Hongfei; Yang, Zhihao

    2011-01-01

    Automatic text summarization for a biomedical concept can help researchers to get the key points of a certain topic from large amount of biomedical literature efficiently. In this paper, we present a method for generating text summary for a given biomedical concept, e.g., H1N1 disease, from multiple documents based on semantic relation extraction. Our approach includes three stages: 1) We extract semantic relations in each sentence using the semantic knowledge representation tool SemRep. 2) We develop a relation-level retrieval method to select the relations most relevant to each query concept and visualize them in a graphic representation. 3) For relations in the relevant set, we extract informative sentences that can interpret them from the document collection to generate text summary using an information retrieval based method. Our major focus in this work is to investigate the contribution of semantic relation extraction to the task of biomedical text summarization. The experimental results on summarization for a set of diseases show that the introduction of semantic knowledge improves the performance and our results are better than the MEAD system, a well-known tool for text summarization.

  8. Preserved musical semantic memory in semantic dementia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Weinstein, Jessica; Koenig, Phyllis; Gunawardena, Delani; McMillan, Corey; Bonner, Michael; Grossman, Murray

    2011-02-01

    To understand the scope of semantic impairment in semantic dementia. Case study. Academic medical center. A man with semantic dementia, as demonstrated by clinical, neuropsychological, and imaging studies. Music performance and magnetic resonance imaging results. Despite profoundly impaired semantic memory for words and objects due to left temporal lobe atrophy, this semiprofessional musician was creative and expressive in demonstrating preserved musical knowledge. Long-term representations of words and objects in semantic memory may be dissociated from meaningful knowledge in other domains, such as music.

  9. An adaptive staircase procedure for the E-Prime programming environment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hairston, W David; Maldjian, Joseph A

    2009-01-01

    Many studies need to determine a subject's threshold for a given task. This can be achieved efficiently using an adaptive staircase procedure. While the logic and algorithms for staircases have been well established, the few pre-programmed routines currently available to researchers require at least moderate programming experience to integrate into new paradigms and experimental settings. Here, we describe a freely distributed routine developed for the E-Prime programming environment that can be easily integrated into any experimental protocol with only a basic understanding of E-Prime. An example experiment (visual temporal-order-judgment task) where subjects report the order of occurrence of two circles illustrates the behavior and consistency of the routine.

  10. Elearning Systems Based on the Semantic Web

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    George Nicola Sammour

    2006-06-01

    Full Text Available ELearning has been identified as a strategic resource that can be utilized as an increasing variety of venues such as homes, workplaces, and traditional institutions of learning, education, and training. ELearning systems are becoming technologically sophisticated and complicated, with regard to training management or course management. Their use does not always match well with traditional modes of teaching and learning and much care needs to be taken when considering the use of ELearning in educational institutions. The use of semantic web in eLearning has been explored with regard to two application areas: 1 software that supports teachers in performing their tasks in flexible online educational settings, and 2 software that interpret the structure of distributed, self organized, and self-directed ELearning and web-based learning. The resulting system will be used by learners to perform the tasks they are asked to do more effectively in the context of gaining knowledge out of the material presented by teachers. These two application areas and related tasks require a semantic representation of educational entities and pedagogical material, specifically the structure and the techniques of the teaching-learning process. In most eLearning systems users are able to manage and reuse learning contents according to their needs without any access problems. However the quality of learning is not guaranteed. This paper emphasizes the integration of the semantic web technologies with Elearning systems, taking into consideration the standards and reusable Learning Objects LO. The advantage to improve the descriptions of content, context and structure of the learning materials and the benefits of providing access to the learning materials are also presented.

  11. Action verbs are processed differently in metaphorical and literal sentences depending on the semantic match of visual primes

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Melissa eTroyer

    2014-12-01

    Full Text Available Language comprehension requires rapid and flexible access to information stored in long-term memory, likely influenced by activation of rich world knowledge and by brain systems that support the processing of sensorimotor content. We hypothesized that while literal language about biological motion might rely on neurocognitive representations of biological motion specific to the details of the actions described, metaphors rely on more generic representations of motion. In a priming and self-paced reading paradigm, participants saw video clips or images of (a an intact point-light walker or (b a scrambled control and read sentences containing literal or metaphoric uses of biological motion verbs either closely or distantly related to the depicted action (walking. We predicted that reading times for literal and metaphorical sentences would show differential sensitivity to the match between the verb and the visual prime. In Experiment 1, we observed interactions between the prime type (walker or scrambled video and the verb type (close or distant match for both literal and metaphorical sentences, but with strikingly different patterns. We found no difference in the verb region of literal sentences for Close-Match verbs after walker or scrambled motion primes, but Distant-Match verbs were read more quickly following walker primes. For metaphorical sentences, the results were roughly reversed, with Distant-Match verbs being read more slowly following a walker compared to scrambled motion. In Experiment 2, we observed a similar pattern following still image primes, though critical interactions emerged later in the sentence. We interpret these findings as evidence for shared recruitment of cognitive and neural mechanisms for processing visual and verbal biological motion information. Metaphoric language using biological motion verbs may recruit neurocognitive mechanisms similar to those used in processing literal language but be represented in a less

  12. Generation of Signs within Semantic and Phonological Categories: Data from Deaf Adults and Children Who Use American Sign Language

    Science.gov (United States)

    Beal-Alvarez, Jennifer S.; Figueroa, Daileen M.

    2017-01-01

    Two key areas of language development include semantic and phonological knowledge. Semantic knowledge relates to word and concept knowledge. Phonological knowledge relates to how language parameters combine to create meaning. We investigated signing deaf adults' and children's semantic and phonological sign generation via one-minute tasks,…

  13. Between-language repetition priming in antonym generation: evidence that translation-equivalent adjectives have shared conceptual representations across languages.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Taylor, Randolph S; Francis, Wendy S

    2017-03-01

    Previous literature has demonstrated conceptual repetition priming across languages in bilinguals. This between-language priming effect is taken as evidence that translation equivalents have shared conceptual representations across languages. However, the vast majority of this research has been conducted using only concrete nouns as stimuli. The present experiment examined conceptual repetition priming within and between languages in adjectives, a part of speech not previously investigated in studies of bilingual conceptual representation. The participants were 100 Spanish-English bilinguals who had regular exposure to both languages. At encoding, participants performed a shallow processing task and a deep-processing task on English and Spanish adjectives. At test, they performed an antonym-generation task in English, in which the target responses were either adjectives presented at encoding or control adjectives not previously presented. The measure of priming was the response time advantage for producing repeated adjectives relative to control adjectives. Significant repetition priming was observed both within and between languages under deep, but not shallow, encoding conditions. The results indicate that the conceptual representations of adjective translation equivalents are shared across languages.

  14. Effect of Perceptual Load on Semantic Access by Speech in Children

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jerger, Susan; Damian, Markus F.; Mills, Candice; Bartlett, James; Tye-Murray, Nancy; Abdi, Herve

    2013-01-01

    Purpose: To examine whether semantic access by speech requires attention in children. Method: Children ("N" = 200) named pictures and ignored distractors on a cross-modal (distractors: auditory-no face) or multimodal (distractors: auditory-static face and audiovisual- dynamic face) picture word task. The cross-modal task had a low load,…

  15. Implicit integration in a case of integrative visual agnosia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Aviezer, Hillel; Landau, Ayelet N; Robertson, Lynn C; Peterson, Mary A; Soroker, Nachum; Sacher, Yaron; Bonneh, Yoram; Bentin, Shlomo

    2007-05-15

    We present a case (SE) with integrative visual agnosia following ischemic stroke affecting the right dorsal and the left ventral pathways of the visual system. Despite his inability to identify global hierarchical letters [Navon, D. (1977). Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 353-383], and his dense object agnosia, SE showed normal global-to-local interference when responding to local letters in Navon hierarchical stimuli and significant picture-word identity priming in a semantic decision task for words. Since priming was absent if these features were scrambled, it stands to reason that these effects were not due to priming by distinctive features. The contrast between priming effects induced by coherent and scrambled stimuli is consistent with implicit but not explicit integration of features into a unified whole. We went on to show that possible/impossible object decisions were facilitated by words in a word-picture priming task, suggesting that prompts could activate perceptually integrated images in a backward fashion. We conclude that the absence of SE's ability to identify visual objects except through tedious serial construction reflects a deficit in accessing an integrated visual representation through bottom-up visual processing alone. However, top-down generated images can help activate these visual representations through semantic links.

  16. Relation Between Mathematical Performance, Math Anxiety, and Affective Priming in Children With and Without Developmental Dyscalculia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kucian, Karin; Zuber, Isabelle; Kohn, Juliane; Poltz, Nadine; Wyschkon, Anne; Esser, Günter; von Aster, Michael

    2018-01-01

    Many children show negative emotions related to mathematics and some even develop mathematics anxiety. The present study focused on the relation between negative emotions and arithmetical performance in children with and without developmental dyscalculia (DD) using an affective priming task. Previous findings suggested that arithmetic performance is influenced if an affective prime precedes the presentation of an arithmetic problem. In children with DD specifically, responses to arithmetic operations are supposed to be facilitated by both negative and mathematics-related primes (= negative math priming effect ).We investigated mathematical performance, math anxiety, and the domain-general abilities of 172 primary school children (76 with DD and 96 controls). All participants also underwent an affective priming task which consisted of the decision whether a simple arithmetic operation (addition or subtraction) that was preceded by a prime (positive/negative/neutral or mathematics-related) was true or false. Our findings did not reveal a negative math priming effect in children with DD. Furthermore, when considering accuracy levels, gender, or math anxiety, the negative math priming effect could not be replicated. However, children with DD showed more math anxiety when explicitly assessed by a specific math anxiety interview and showed lower mathematical performance compared to controls. Moreover, math anxiety was equally present in boys and girls, even in the earliest stages of schooling, and interfered negatively with performance. In conclusion, mathematics is often associated with negative emotions that can be manifested in specific math anxiety, particularly in children with DD. Importantly, present findings suggest that in the assessed age group, it is more reliable to judge math anxiety and investigate its effects on mathematical performance explicitly by adequate questionnaires than by an affective math priming task.

  17. Relation Between Mathematical Performance, Math Anxiety, and Affective Priming in Children With and Without Developmental Dyscalculia

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Karin Kucian

    2018-04-01

    Full Text Available Many children show negative emotions related to mathematics and some even develop mathematics anxiety. The present study focused on the relation between negative emotions and arithmetical performance in children with and without developmental dyscalculia (DD using an affective priming task. Previous findings suggested that arithmetic performance is influenced if an affective prime precedes the presentation of an arithmetic problem. In children with DD specifically, responses to arithmetic operations are supposed to be facilitated by both negative and mathematics-related primes (=negative math priming effect.We investigated mathematical performance, math anxiety, and the domain-general abilities of 172 primary school children (76 with DD and 96 controls. All participants also underwent an affective priming task which consisted of the decision whether a simple arithmetic operation (addition or subtraction that was preceded by a prime (positive/negative/neutral or mathematics-related was true or false. Our findings did not reveal a negative math priming effect in children with DD. Furthermore, when considering accuracy levels, gender, or math anxiety, the negative math priming effect could not be replicated. However, children with DD showed more math anxiety when explicitly assessed by a specific math anxiety interview and showed lower mathematical performance compared to controls. Moreover, math anxiety was equally present in boys and girls, even in the earliest stages of schooling, and interfered negatively with performance. In conclusion, mathematics is often associated with negative emotions that can be manifested in specific math anxiety, particularly in children with DD. Importantly, present findings suggest that in the assessed age group, it is more reliable to judge math anxiety and investigate its effects on mathematical performance explicitly by adequate questionnaires than by an affective math priming task.

  18. Relation Between Mathematical Performance, Math Anxiety, and Affective Priming in Children With and Without Developmental Dyscalculia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kucian, Karin; Zuber, Isabelle; Kohn, Juliane; Poltz, Nadine; Wyschkon, Anne; Esser, Günter; von Aster, Michael

    2018-01-01

    Many children show negative emotions related to mathematics and some even develop mathematics anxiety. The present study focused on the relation between negative emotions and arithmetical performance in children with and without developmental dyscalculia (DD) using an affective priming task. Previous findings suggested that arithmetic performance is influenced if an affective prime precedes the presentation of an arithmetic problem. In children with DD specifically, responses to arithmetic operations are supposed to be facilitated by both negative and mathematics-related primes (=negative math priming effect).We investigated mathematical performance, math anxiety, and the domain-general abilities of 172 primary school children (76 with DD and 96 controls). All participants also underwent an affective priming task which consisted of the decision whether a simple arithmetic operation (addition or subtraction) that was preceded by a prime (positive/negative/neutral or mathematics-related) was true or false. Our findings did not reveal a negative math priming effect in children with DD. Furthermore, when considering accuracy levels, gender, or math anxiety, the negative math priming effect could not be replicated. However, children with DD showed more math anxiety when explicitly assessed by a specific math anxiety interview and showed lower mathematical performance compared to controls. Moreover, math anxiety was equally present in boys and girls, even in the earliest stages of schooling, and interfered negatively with performance. In conclusion, mathematics is often associated with negative emotions that can be manifested in specific math anxiety, particularly in children with DD. Importantly, present findings suggest that in the assessed age group, it is more reliable to judge math anxiety and investigate its effects on mathematical performance explicitly by adequate questionnaires than by an affective math priming task.

  19. Priming healthy eating. You can't prime all the people all of the time.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Forwood, Suzanna E; Ahern, Amy L; Hollands, Gareth J; Ng, Yin-Lam; Marteau, Theresa M

    2015-06-01

    In the context of a food purchasing environment filled with advertising and promotions, and an increased desire from policy makers to guide individuals toward choosing healthier foods, this study tests whether priming methods that use healthy food adverts to increase preference for healthier food generalize to a representative population. In two studies (Study 1 n = 143; Study 2 n = 764), participants were randomly allocated to a prime condition, where they viewed fruit and vegetable advertisements, or a control condition, with no advertisements. A subsequent forced choice task assessed preference between fruits and other sweet snacks. Additional measures included current hunger and thirst, dietary restraint, age, gender, education and self-reported weight and height. In Study 1, hunger reduced preferences for fruits (OR (95% CI) = 0.38 (0.26-0.56), p choice was unaffected by hunger or the prime. This study provides preliminary evidence that the effects of adverts on healthy eating choices depend on key individual traits (education level) and states (hunger), do not generalize to a broader population and have the potential to increase health inequalities arising from food choice. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

  20. Priming healthy eating. You can't prime all the people all of the time☆

    Science.gov (United States)

    Forwood, Suzanna E.; Ahern, Amy L.; Hollands, Gareth J.; Ng, Yin-Lam; Marteau, Theresa M.

    2015-01-01

    Objective In the context of a food purchasing environment filled with advertising and promotions, and an increased desire from policy makers to guide individuals toward choosing healthier foods, this study tests whether priming methods that use healthy food adverts to increase preference for healthier food generalize to a representative population. MethodsIn two studies (Study 1 n = 143; Study 2 n = 764), participants were randomly allocated to a prime condition, where they viewed fruit and vegetable advertisements, or a control condition, with no advertisements. A subsequent forced choice task assessed preference between fruits and other sweet snacks. Additional measures included current hunger and thirst, dietary restraint, age, gender, education and self-reported weight and height. ResultsIn Study 1, hunger reduced preferences for fruits (OR (95% CI) = 0.38 (0.26–0.56), p choice was unaffected by hunger or the prime. ConclusionThis study provides preliminary evidence that the effects of adverts on healthy eating choices depend on key individual traits (education level) and states (hunger), do not generalize to a broader population and have the potential to increase health inequalities arising from food choice. PMID:25636234

  1. Seeing emotions in the eyes – Inverse priming effects induced by eyes expressing mental states

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Caroline eWagenbreth

    2014-09-01

    Full Text Available ObjectiveAutomatic emotional processing of faces and facial expressions gain more and more of relevance in terms of social communication. Among a variety of different primes, targets and tasks, whole face images and facial expressions have been used to affectively prime emotional responses. This study investigates whether emotional information provided solely in eye regions that display mental states can also trigger affective priming.MethodsSixteen subjects answered a lexical decision task (LDT coupled with an affective priming paradigm. Emotion-associated eye regions were extracted from photographs of faces and acted as primes, whereas targets were either words or pseudo-words. Participants had to decide whether the targets were real German words or generated pseudo-words. Primes and targets belonged to the emotional categories fear, disgust, happiness and neutral.ResultsA general valence effect for positive words was observed: Responses in the LDT were faster for target words of the emotional category happiness when compared to other categories. Importantly, pictures of emotional eye regions preceding the target words affected their subsequent classification. While we show a classical priming effect for neutral target words - with shorter RT for congruent compared to incongruent prime-target pairs- , we observed an inverse priming effect for fearful and happy target words - with shorter RT for incongruent compared to congruent prime-target pairs. These inverse priming effects were driven exclusively by specific prime-target pairs.ConclusionReduced facial emotional information is sufficient to induce automatic implicit emotional processing. The emotional-associated eye regions were processed with respect to their emotional valence and affected the performance on the LDT.

  2. Bilingual Language Control and General Purpose Cognitive Control among Individuals with Bilingual Aphasia: Evidence Based on Negative Priming and Flanker Tasks

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dash, Tanya; Kar, Bhoomika R.

    2014-01-01

    Background. Bilingualism results in an added advantage with respect to cognitive control. The interaction between bilingual language control and general purpose cognitive control systems can also be understood by studying executive control among individuals with bilingual aphasia. Objectives. The current study examined the subcomponents of cognitive control in bilingual aphasia. A case study approach was used to investigate whether cognitive control and language control are two separate systems and how factors related to bilingualism interact with control processes. Methods. Four individuals with bilingual aphasia performed a language background questionnaire, picture description task, and two experimental tasks (nonlinguistic negative priming task and linguistic and nonlinguistic versions of flanker task). Results. A descriptive approach was used to analyse the data using reaction time and accuracy measures. The cumulative distribution function plots were used to visualize the variations in performance across conditions. The results highlight the distinction between general purpose cognitive control and bilingual language control mechanisms. Conclusion. All participants showed predominant use of the reactive control mechanism to compensate for the limited resources system. Independent yet interactive systems for bilingual language control and general purpose cognitive control were postulated based on the experimental data derived from individuals with bilingual aphasia. PMID:24982591

  3. Effects of script types of Japanese loan words on priming performance.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hayashi, Chiyoko

    2005-04-01

    23 female undergraduate students (M=20 yr., 10 mo., SD=15 mo.) were given a word-fragment completion task, containing a study and nonstudy list. In the present study, the effect of orthographic familiarity (e.g., script type) of a test item on a word-fragment completion task was examined. The script types of word stimuli (Katakana and Hiragana) were manipulated between a study and test phase. Priming effect was greater when the script type was the same between a study and test phase than in the cross-script condition. Further, even if the script type of word stimulus was different between study and test phases, a significant priming effect was obtained when the test fragment was orthographically familiar. These results suggested that not only the consistency of the perceptual feature of the stimulus word between study and test phases, but also orthographic familiarity of the stimulus word in the test phase facilitated priming effect in a word-fragment completion test.

  4. Semantic Advertising

    OpenAIRE

    Zamanzadeh, Ben; Ashish, Naveen; Ramakrishnan, Cartic; Zimmerman, John

    2013-01-01

    We present the concept of Semantic Advertising which we see as the future of online advertising. Semantic Advertising is online advertising powered by semantic technology which essentially enables us to represent and reason with concepts and the meaning of things. This paper aims to 1) Define semantic advertising, 2) Place it in the context of broader and more widely used concepts such as the Semantic Web and Semantic Search, 3) Provide a survey of work in related areas such as context matchi...

  5. Assessing semantic similarity of texts - Methods and algorithms

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rozeva, Anna; Zerkova, Silvia

    2017-12-01

    Assessing the semantic similarity of texts is an important part of different text-related applications like educational systems, information retrieval, text summarization, etc. This task is performed by sophisticated analysis, which implements text-mining techniques. Text mining involves several pre-processing steps, which provide for obtaining structured representative model of the documents in a corpus by means of extracting and selecting the features, characterizing their content. Generally the model is vector-based and enables further analysis with knowledge discovery approaches. Algorithms and measures are used for assessing texts at syntactical and semantic level. An important text-mining method and similarity measure is latent semantic analysis (LSA). It provides for reducing the dimensionality of the document vector space and better capturing the text semantics. The mathematical background of LSA for deriving the meaning of the words in a given text by exploring their co-occurrence is examined. The algorithm for obtaining the vector representation of words and their corresponding latent concepts in a reduced multidimensional space as well as similarity calculation are presented.

  6. Semantic memory is impaired in patients with unilateral anterior temporal lobe resection for temporal lobe epilepsy.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lambon Ralph, Matthew A; Ehsan, Sheeba; Baker, Gus A; Rogers, Timothy T

    2012-01-01

    Contemporary clinical and basic neuroscience studies have increasingly implicated the anterior temporal lobe regions, bilaterally, in the formation of coherent concepts. Mounting convergent evidence for the importance of the anterior temporal lobe in semantic memory is found in patients with bilateral anterior temporal lobe damage (e.g. semantic dementia), functional neuroimaging and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation studies. If this proposal is correct, then one might expect patients with anterior temporal lobe resection for long-standing temporal lobe epilepsy to be semantically impaired. Such patients, however, do not present clinically with striking comprehension deficits but with amnesia and variable anomia, leading some to conclude that semantic memory is intact in resection for temporal lobe epilepsy and thus casting doubt over the conclusions drawn from semantic dementia and linked basic neuroscience studies. Whilst there is a considerable neuropsychological literature on temporal lobe epilepsy, few studies have probed semantic memory directly, with mixed results, and none have undertaken the same type of systematic investigation of semantic processing that has been conducted with other patient groups. In this study, therefore, we investigated the semantic performance of 20 patients with resection for chronic temporal lobe epilepsy with a full battery of semantic assessments, including more sensitive measures of semantic processing. The results provide a bridge between the current clinical observations about resection for temporal lobe epilepsy and the expectations from semantic dementia and other neuroscience findings. Specifically, we found that on simple semantic tasks, the patients' accuracy fell in the normal range, with the exception that some patients with left resection for temporal lobe epilepsy had measurable anomia. Once the semantic assessments were made more challenging, by probing specific-level concepts, lower frequency

  7. Excitatory and inhibitory priming by attended and ignored non-recycled words with monolinguals and bilinguals.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Neumann, Ewald; Nkrumah, Ivy K; Chen, Zhe

    2018-03-03

    Experiments examining identity priming from attended and ignored novel words (words that are used only once except when repetition is required due to experimental manipulation) in a lexical decision task are reported. Experiment 1 tested English monolinguals whereas Experiment 2 tested Twi (a native language of Ghana, Africa)-English bilinguals. Participants were presented with sequential pairs of stimuli composed of a prime followed by a probe, with each containing two items. The participants were required to name the target word in the prime display, and to make a lexical decision to the target item in the probe display. On attended repetition (AR) trials the probe target item was identical to the target word on the preceding attentional display. On ignored repetition (IR) trials the probe target item was the same as the distractor word in the preceding attentional display. The experiments produced facilitated (positive) priming in the AR trials and delayed (negative) priming in the IR trials. Significantly, the positive and negative priming effects also replicated across both monolingual and bilingual groups of participants, despite the fact that the bilinguals were responding to the task in their non-dominant language.

  8. Classification with an edge: Improving semantic image segmentation with boundary detection

    Science.gov (United States)

    Marmanis, D.; Schindler, K.; Wegner, J. D.; Galliani, S.; Datcu, M.; Stilla, U.

    2018-01-01

    We present an end-to-end trainable deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for semantic segmentation with built-in awareness of semantically meaningful boundaries. Semantic segmentation is a fundamental remote sensing task, and most state-of-the-art methods rely on DCNNs as their workhorse. A major reason for their success is that deep networks learn to accumulate contextual information over very large receptive fields. However, this success comes at a cost, since the associated loss of effective spatial resolution washes out high-frequency details and leads to blurry object boundaries. Here, we propose to counter this effect by combining semantic segmentation with semantically informed edge detection, thus making class boundaries explicit in the model. First, we construct a comparatively simple, memory-efficient model by adding boundary detection to the SEGNET encoder-decoder architecture. Second, we also include boundary detection in FCN-type models and set up a high-end classifier ensemble. We show that boundary detection significantly improves semantic segmentation with CNNs in an end-to-end training scheme. Our best model achieves >90% overall accuracy on the ISPRS Vaihingen benchmark.

  9. Dissociating stimulus-stimulus and response-response effects in the Stroop task

    OpenAIRE

    Schmidt, James; Cheesman, J

    2005-01-01

    The separate semantic and response competition interactions between colour and word processing in a manual Stroop task were evaluated by comparing three trial types. Identity trials are both semantically compatible and response compatible (e.g., BLUE in the colour blue), different response trials are both semantically incompatible and response incompatible (e.g., BLUE in the colour green, where blue and green have different response keys), and same response trials are semantically incompatibl...

  10. Latent semantic analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Evangelopoulos, Nicholas E

    2013-11-01

    This article reviews latent semantic analysis (LSA), a theory of meaning as well as a method for extracting that meaning from passages of text, based on statistical computations over a collection of documents. LSA as a theory of meaning defines a latent semantic space where documents and individual words are represented as vectors. LSA as a computational technique uses linear algebra to extract dimensions that represent that space. This representation enables the computation of similarity among terms and documents, categorization of terms and documents, and summarization of large collections of documents using automated procedures that mimic the way humans perform similar cognitive tasks. We present some technical details, various illustrative examples, and discuss a number of applications from linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, education, information science, and analysis of textual data in general. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:683-692. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1254 CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  11. Auditory phonological priming in children and adults during word repetition

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cleary, Miranda; Schwartz, Richard G.

    2004-05-01

    Short-term auditory phonological priming effects involve changes in the speed with which words are processed by a listener as a function of recent exposure to other similar-sounding words. Activation of phonological/lexical representations appears to persist beyond the immediate offset of a word, influencing subsequent processing. Priming effects are commonly cited as demonstrating concurrent activation of word/phonological candidates during word identification. Phonological priming is controversial, the direction of effects (facilitating versus slowing) varying with the prime-target relationship. In adults, it has repeatedly been demonstrated, however, that hearing a prime word that rhymes with the following target word (ISI=50 ms) decreases the time necessary to initiate repetition of the target, relative to when the prime and target have no phonemic overlap. Activation of phonological representations in children has not typically been studied using this paradigm, auditory-word + picture-naming tasks being used instead. The present study employed an auditory phonological priming paradigm being developed for use with normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children. Initial results from normal-hearing adults replicate previous reports of faster naming times for targets following a rhyming prime word than for targets following a prime having no phonemes in common. Results from normal-hearing children will also be reported. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD T32DC000039.

  12. Constituent order and semantic parallelism in online comprehension: eye-tracking evidence from German.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Knoeferle, Pia; Crocker, Matthew W

    2009-12-01

    Reading times for the second conjunct of and-coordinated clauses are faster when the second conjunct parallels the first conjunct in its syntactic or semantic (animacy) structure than when its structure differs (Frazier, Munn, & Clifton, 2000; Frazier, Taft, Roeper, & Clifton, 1984). What remains unclear, however, is the time course of parallelism effects, their scope, and the kinds of linguistic information to which they are sensitive. Findings from the first two eye-tracking experiments revealed incremental constituent order parallelism across the board-both during structural disambiguation (Experiment 1) and in sentences with unambiguously case-marked constituent order (Experiment 2), as well as for both marked and unmarked constituent orders (Experiments 1 and 2). Findings from Experiment 3 revealed effects of both constituent order and subtle semantic (noun phrase similarity) parallelism. Together our findings provide evidence for an across-the-board account of parallelism for processing and-coordinated clauses, in which both constituent order and semantic aspects of representations contribute towards incremental parallelism effects. We discuss our findings in the context of existing findings on parallelism and priming, as well as mechanisms of sentence processing.

  13. A SEMantic and EPisodic Memory Test (SEMEP) Developed within the Embodied Cognition Framework: Application to Normal Aging, Alzheimer's Disease and Semantic Dementia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vallet, Guillaume T; Hudon, Carol; Bier, Nathalie; Macoir, Joël; Versace, Rémy; Simard, Martine

    2017-01-01

    Embodiment has highlighted the importance of sensory-motor components in cognition. Perception and memory are thus very tightly bound together, and episodic and semantic memories should rely on the same grounded memory traces. Reduced perception should then directly reduce the ability to encode and retrieve an episodic memory, as in normal aging. Multimodal integration deficits, as in Alzheimer's disease, should lead to more severe episodic memory impairment. The present study introduces a new memory test developed to take into account these assumptions. The SEMEP (SEMantic-Episodic) memory test proposes to assess conjointly semantic and episodic knowledge across multiple tasks: semantic matching, naming, free recall, and recognition. The performance of young adults is compared to healthy elderly adults (HE), patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and patients with semantic dementia (SD). The results show specific patterns of performance between the groups. HE commit memory errors only for presented but not to be remembered items. AD patients present the worst episodic memory performance associated with intrusion errors (recall or recognition of items never presented). They were the only group to not benefit from a visual isolation (addition of a yellow background), a method known to increase the distinctiveness of the memory traces. Finally, SD patients suffer from the most severe semantic impairment. To conclude, confusion errors are common across all the elderly groups, whereas AD was the only group to exhibit regular intrusion errors and SD patients to show severe semantic impairment.

  14. A SEMantic and EPisodic Memory Test (SEMEP Developed within the Embodied Cognition Framework: Application to Normal Aging, Alzheimer's Disease and Semantic Dementia

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Guillaume T. Vallet

    2017-09-01

    Full Text Available Embodiment has highlighted the importance of sensory-motor components in cognition. Perception and memory are thus very tightly bound together, and episodic and semantic memories should rely on the same grounded memory traces. Reduced perception should then directly reduce the ability to encode and retrieve an episodic memory, as in normal aging. Multimodal integration deficits, as in Alzheimer's disease, should lead to more severe episodic memory impairment. The present study introduces a new memory test developed to take into account these assumptions. The SEMEP (SEMantic-Episodic memory test proposes to assess conjointly semantic and episodic knowledge across multiple tasks: semantic matching, naming, free recall, and recognition. The performance of young adults is compared to healthy elderly adults (HE, patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD, and patients with semantic dementia (SD. The results show specific patterns of performance between the groups. HE commit memory errors only for presented but not to be remembered items. AD patients present the worst episodic memory performance associated with intrusion errors (recall or recognition of items never presented. They were the only group to not benefit from a visual isolation (addition of a yellow background, a method known to increase the distinctiveness of the memory traces. Finally, SD patients suffer from the most severe semantic impairment. To conclude, confusion errors are common across all the elderly groups, whereas AD was the only group to exhibit regular intrusion errors and SD patients to show severe semantic impairment.

  15. The semantic representation of prejudice and stereotypes.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bhatia, Sudeep

    2017-07-01

    We use a theory of semantic representation to study prejudice and stereotyping. Particularly, we consider large datasets of newspaper articles published in the United States, and apply latent semantic analysis (LSA), a prominent model of human semantic memory, to these datasets to learn representations for common male and female, White, African American, and Latino names. LSA performs a singular value decomposition on word distribution statistics in order to recover word vector representations, and we find that our recovered representations display the types of biases observed in human participants using tasks such as the implicit association test. Importantly, these biases are strongest for vector representations with moderate dimensionality, and weaken or disappear for representations with very high or very low dimensionality. Moderate dimensional LSA models are also the best at learning race, ethnicity, and gender-based categories, suggesting that social category knowledge, acquired through dimensionality reduction on word distribution statistics, can facilitate prejudiced and stereotyped associations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  16. Priming Hand Motor Training with Repetitive Stimulation of the Fingertips; Performance Gain and Functional Imaging of Training Effects.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lotze, Martin; Ladda, Aija Marie; Roschka, Sybille; Platz, Thomas; Dinse, Hubert R

    Application of repetitive electrical stimulation (rES) of the fingers has been shown to improve tactile perception and sensorimotor performance in healthy individuals. To increase motor performance by priming the effects of active motor training (arm ability training; AAT) using rES. We compared the performance gain for the training increase of the averaged AAT tasks of both hands in two groups of strongly right-handed healthy volunteers. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) before and after AAT was assessed using three tasks for each hand separately: finger sequence tapping, visually guided grip force modulation, and writing. Performance during fMRI was controlled for preciseness and frequency. A total of 30 participants underwent a two-week unilateral left hand AAT, 15 participants with 20 minutes of rES priming of all fingertips of the trained hand, and 15 participants without rES priming. rES-primed AAT improved the trained left-hand performance across all training tasks on average by 32.9%, non-primed AAT improved by 29.5%. This gain in AAT performance with rES priming was predominantly driven by an increased finger tapping velocity. Functional imaging showed comparable changes for both training groups over time. Across all participants, improved AAT performance was associated with a higher contralateral primary somatosensory cortex (S1) fMRI activation magnitude during the grip force modulation task. This study highlights the importance of S1 for hand motor training gain. In addition, it suggests the usage of rES of the fingertips for priming active hand motor training. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  17. Spatial-orientation priming impedes rather than facilitates the spontaneous control of hand-retraction speeds in patients with Parkinson's disease.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Polina Yanovich

    Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Often in Parkinson's disease (PD motor-related problems overshadow latent non-motor deficits as it is difficult to dissociate one from the other with commonly used observational inventories. Here we ask if the variability patterns of hand speed and acceleration would be revealing of deficits in spatial-orientation related decisions as patients performed a familiar reach-to-grasp task. To this end we use spatial-orientation priming which normally facilitates motor-program selection and asked whether in PD spatial-orientation priming helps or hinders performance. METHODS: To dissociate spatial-orientation- and motor-related deficits participants performed two versions of the task. The biomechanical version (DEFAULT required the same postural- and hand-paths as the orientation-priming version (primed-UP. Any differences in the patients here could not be due to motor issues as the tasks were biomechanically identical. The other priming version (primed-DOWN however required additional spatial and postural processing. We assessed in all three cases both the forward segment deliberately aimed towards the spatial-target and the retracting segment, spontaneously bringing the hand to rest without an instructed goal. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: We found that forward and retracting segments belonged in two different statistical classes according to the fluctuations of speed and acceleration maxima. Further inspection revealed conservation of the forward (voluntary control of speed but in PD a discontinuity of this control emerged during the uninstructed retractions which was absent in NC. Two PD groups self-emerged: one group in which priming always affected the retractions and the other in which only the more challenging primed-DOWN condition was affected. These PD-groups self-formed according to the speed variability patterns, which systematically changed along a gradient that depended on the priming, thus dissociating motor from spatial

  18. The picture superiority effect in a cross-modality recognition task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stenbert, G; Radeborg, K; Hedman, L R

    1995-07-01

    Words and pictures were studied and recognition tests given in which each studied object was to be recognized in both word and picture format. The main dependent variable was the latency of the recognition decision. The purpose was to investigate the effects of study modality (word or picture), of congruence between study and test modalities, and of priming resulting from repeated testing. Experiments 1 and 2 used the same basic design, but the latter also varied retention interval. Experiment 3 added a manipulation of instructions to name studied objects, and Experiment 4 deviated from the others by presenting both picture and word referring to the same object together for study. The results showed that congruence between study and test modalities consistently facilitated recognition. Furthermore, items studied as pictures were more rapidly recognized than were items studied as words. With repeated testing, the second instance was affected by its predecessor, but the facilitating effect of picture-to-word priming exceeded that of word-to-picture priming. The finds suggest a two- stage recognition process, in which the first is based on perceptual familiarity and the second uses semantic links for a retrieval search. Common-code theories that grant privileged access to the semantic code for pictures or, alternatively, dual-code theories that assume mnemonic superiority for the image code are supported by the findings. Explanations of the picture superiority effect as resulting from dual encoding of pictures are not supported by the data.

  19. Adults and children with high imagery show more pronounced perceptual priming effect.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hatakeyama, T

    1997-06-01

    36 children in Grade 5 and 59 university students, all native speakers of Japanese, studied three types of priming stimuli in a mixed list: words written in hiragana (Japanese syllabary used in writing), words written in kanji (Chinese characters also used in writing), and pictures. They were then given a task involving completion of hiragana-word fragments: the task involved studied and nonstudied items. For both children and university students, words in hiragana produced the largest priming effects, that is, the words that had appeared in hiragana in the preceding study phase were generated more often in the test phase of word completion than the other two types of priming stimuli. This confirms that the perceptual priming effect depends much on data-driven processing. For both age groups, words in kanji produced nearly half the priming effects seen for hiragana-words. On the other hand, pictures had no priming effect for children but they had a similar effect to kanji-words for students. The discrepancy between kanji-words and pictures for children suggests that the former force the subject to read the words, which, possibly, activates the hiragana-words, while the latter do not necessarily force labelling the pictures. Among three kinds of imagery tests, the Verbalizer-Visualizer Questionnaire predicted priming scores for children and the Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery did so for students, but the Test of Visual Imagery Control did not predict the scores for either age group. This shows that children reporting habitual use of imagery and adults reporting vivid imagery have more pronounced perceptual priming effects. We conclude that the imagery ability based on self-judgments reflects real characteristics of the perceptual representation system of Tulving and Schacter (1990).

  20. Semantator: annotating clinical narratives with semantic web ontologies.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Song, Dezhao; Chute, Christopher G; Tao, Cui

    2012-01-01

    To facilitate clinical research, clinical data needs to be stored in a machine processable and understandable way. Manual annotating clinical data is time consuming. Automatic approaches (e.g., Natural Language Processing systems) have been adopted to convert such data into structured formats; however, the quality of such automatically extracted data may not always be satisfying. In this paper, we propose Semantator, a semi-automatic tool for document annotation with Semantic Web ontologies. With a loaded free text document and an ontology, Semantator supports the creation/deletion of ontology instances for any document fragment, linking/disconnecting instances with the properties in the ontology, and also enables automatic annotation by connecting to the NCBO annotator and cTAKES. By representing annotations in Semantic Web standards, Semantator supports reasoning based upon the underlying semantics of the owl:disjointWith and owl:equivalentClass predicates. We present discussions based on user experiences of using Semantator.

  1. Selective attention affects conceptual object priming and recognition: a study with young and older adults.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ballesteros, Soledad; Mayas, Julia

    2014-01-01

    In the present study, we investigated the effects of selective attention at encoding on conceptual object priming (Experiment 1) and old-new recognition memory (Experiment 2) tasks in young and older adults. The procedures of both experiments included encoding and memory test phases separated by a short delay. At encoding, the picture outlines of two familiar objects, one in blue and the other in green, were presented to the left and to the right of fixation. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to attend to the picture outline of a certain color and to classify the object as natural or artificial. After a short delay, participants performed a natural/artificial speeded conceptual classification task with repeated attended, repeated unattended, and new pictures. In Experiment 2, participants at encoding memorized the attended pictures and classify them as natural or artificial. After the encoding phase, they performed an old-new recognition memory task. Consistent with previous findings with perceptual priming tasks, we found that conceptual object priming, like explicit memory, required attention at encoding. Significant priming was obtained in both age groups, but only for those pictures that were attended at encoding. Although older adults were slower than young adults, both groups showed facilitation for attended pictures. In line with previous studies, young adults had better recognition memory than older adults.

  2. Selective attention affects conceptual object priming and recognition: A study with young and older adults

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Soledad eBallesteros

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available In the present study, we investigated the effects of selective attention at encoding on conceptual object priming (Experiment 1 and old-new recognition memory (Experiment 2 tasks in young and older adults. The procedures of both experiments included encoding and memory test phases separated by a short delay. At encoding, the picture outlines of two familiar objects, one in blue and the other in green, were presented to the left and to the right of fixation. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to attend to the picture outline of a certain color and to classify the object as natural or artificial. After a short delay, participants performed a natural/ artificial speeded conceptual classification task with repeated attended, repeated unattended and new pictures. In Experiment 2, participants at encoding memorized the attended pictures and classified them as natural or artificial. After the encoding phase, they performed an old-new recognition memory task. Consistent with previous findings with perceptual priming tasks, we found that conceptual object priming, like explicit memory, required attention at encoding. Significant priming was obtained in both age groups, but only for those pictures that were attended at encoding. Although older adults were slower than young adults, both groups showed facilitation for attended pictures. In line with previous studies, young adults had better recognition memory than older adults.

  3. Brain oscillatory subsequent memory effects differ in power and long-range synchronization between semantic and survival processing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fellner, Marie-Christin; Bäuml, Karl-Heinz T; Hanslmayr, Simon

    2013-10-01

    Memory crucially depends on the way information is processed during encoding. Differences in processes during encoding not only lead to differences in memory performance but also rely on different brain networks. Although these assumptions are corroborated by several previous fMRI and ERP studies, little is known about how brain oscillations dissociate between different memory encoding tasks. The present study therefore compared encoding related brain oscillatory activity elicited by two very efficient encoding tasks: a typical deep semantic item feature judgment task and a more elaborative survival encoding task. Subjects were asked to judge words either for survival relevance or for animacy, as indicated by a cue presented prior to the item. This allowed dissociating pre-item activity from item-related activity for both tasks. Replicating prior studies, survival processing led to higher recognition performance than semantic processing. Successful encoding in the semantic condition was reflected by a strong decrease in alpha and beta power, whereas successful encoding in the survival condition was related to increased alpha and beta long-range phase synchrony. Moreover, a pre-item subsequent memory effect in theta power was found which did not vary with encoding condition. These results show that measures of local synchrony (power) and global long range-synchrony (phase synchronization) dissociate between memory encoding processes. Whereas semantic encoding was reflected in decreases in local synchrony, increases in global long range synchrony were related to elaborative survival encoding, presumably reflecting the involvement of a more widespread cortical network in this task. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  4. Effects of Morphology and Semantic Transparency on Typing Latencies in English Compound and Pseudocompound Words

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gagné, Christina L.; Spalding, Thomas L.

    2016-01-01

    We used a typing task to measure the written production of compounds, pseudocompounds, and monomorphemic words on a letter-by-letter basis to determine whether written production (as measured by interletter typing speed) was affected by morphemic structure and semantic transparency of the constituents. Semantic transparency was analyzed using a…

  5. Differences in Processing of Taxonomic and Sequential Relations in Semantic Memory: An fMRI Investigation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kuchinke, Lars; van der Meer, Elke; Krueger, Frank

    2009-01-01

    Conceptual knowledge of our world is represented in semantic memory in terms of concepts and semantic relations between concepts. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the cortical regions underlying the processing of sequential and taxonomic relations. Participants were presented verbal cues and performed three tasks:…

  6. When Meaning Is Not Enough: Distributional and Semantic Cues to Word Categorization in Child Directed Speech.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Feijoo, Sara; Muñoz, Carmen; Amadó, Anna; Serrat, Elisabet

    2017-01-01

    One of the most important tasks in first language development is assigning words to their grammatical category. The Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis postulates that, in order to accomplish this task, children are guided by a neat correspondence between semantic and grammatical categories, since nouns typically refer to objects and verbs to actions. It is this correspondence that guides children's initial word categorization. Other approaches, on the other hand, suggest that children might make use of distributional cues and word contexts to accomplish the word categorization task. According to such approaches, the Semantic Bootstrapping assumption offers an important limitation, as it might not be true that all the nouns that children hear refer to specific objects or people. In order to explore that, we carried out two studies based on analyses of children's linguistic input. We analyzed child-directed speech addressed to four children under the age of 2;6, taken from the CHILDES database. The corpora were selected from the Manchester corpus. The corpora from the four selected children contained a total of 10,681 word types and 364,196 word tokens. In our first study, discriminant analyses were performed using semantic cues alone. The results show that many of the nouns found in parents' speech do not relate to specific objects and that semantic information alone might not be sufficient for successful word categorization. Given that there must be an additional source of information which, alongside with semantics, might assist young learners in word categorization, our second study explores the availability of both distributional and semantic cues in child-directed speech. Our results confirm that this combination might yield better results for word categorization. These results are in line with theories that suggest the need for an integration of multiple cues from different sources in language development.

  7. Semantic Categorization Precedes Affective Evaluation of Visual Scenes

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nummenmaa, Lauri; Hyona, Jukka; Calvo, Manuel G.

    2010-01-01

    We compared the primacy of affective versus semantic categorization by using forced-choice saccadic and manual response tasks. Participants viewed paired emotional and neutral scenes involving humans or animals flashed rapidly in extrafoveal vision. Participants were instructed to categorize the targets by saccading toward the location occupied by…

  8. Event-related brain potentials that distinguish false memory for events that occurred only seconds in the past.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Hong; Voss, Joel L; Guo, Chunyan

    2012-07-30

    False memory often involves retrieving events from the distant past that did not actually happen. However, recent evidence obtained using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm for eliciting false memory experiences suggests that individuals can falsely believe that events occurred mere seconds in the past when they in fact did not. Subjects in these experiments endorsed unstudied critical lure words as having been studied, despite the fact that word lists were studied just moments before. We identified event-related brain potential (ERP) correlates of this experience, and included a repetition priming manipulation to better assess the functional significance of these ERPs. Behavioral and ERP data were collected from 21 Capital Normal University students using a short-term DRM task. Two categories of effects were identified that distinguished true from false short-term memory: (1) early semantic priming effects from 300 to 500 ms and (2) later retrieval and retrieval-monitoring effects after 500 ms. The repetition priming manipulation had distinct influences on these effects, consistent with their differential associations with semantic priming versus episodic retrieval. Characterization of ERPs related to semantic priming and episodic retrieval provides important information regarding the mechanisms of short-term false memory. In contrast, most studies examining false memory in standard long-delay DRM paradigms identify ERP effects related only to retrieval monitoring. These findings highlight the neural processing involved in illusions of memory after very brief delays and highlight the role of semantic processing in short-term false memory.

  9. The MediaMill TRECVID 2012 semantic video search engine

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Snoek, C.G.M.; van de Sande, K.E.A.; Habibian, A.; Kordumova, S.; Li, Z.; Mazloom, M.; Pintea, S.L.; Tao, R.; Koelma, D.C.; Smeulders, A.W.M.

    2012-01-01

    In this paper we describe our TRECVID 2012 video retrieval experiments. The MediaMill team participated in four tasks: semantic indexing, multimedia event detection, multimedia event recounting and instance search. The starting point for the MediaMill detection approach is our top-performing

  10. Interference by Process, Not Content, Determines Semantic Auditory Distraction

    Science.gov (United States)

    Marsh, John E.; Hughes, Robert W.; Jones, Dylan M.

    2009-01-01

    Distraction by irrelevant background sound of visually-based cognitive tasks illustrates the vulnerability of attentional selectivity across modalities. Four experiments centred on auditory distraction during tests of memory for visually-presented semantic information. Meaningful irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic…

  11. What Klein’s semantic gradient does and does not really show: decomposing Stroop interference into task and informational conflict components

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yulia eLevin

    2016-02-01

    Full Text Available The present study suggests that the idea that Stroop interference originates from multiple components may gain theoretically from integrating two independent frameworks. The first framework is represented by the well-known notion of semantic gradient of interference and the second one is the distinction between two types of conflict – the task and the informational conflict – giving rise to the interference (Goldfarb & Henik, 2007; McLeod & MacDonald, 2000. The proposed integration led to the conclusion that two (i.e., orthographic and lexical components of the four theoretically distinct components represent task conflict, and the other two (i.e., indirect and direct informational conflict components represent informational conflict. The four components were independently estimated in a series of experiments. The results confirmed the contribution of task conflict (estimated by a robust orthographic component and of informational conflict (estimated by a strong direct informational conflict component to Stroop interference. However, the performed critical review of the relevant literature (see General Discussion, as well as the results of the experiments reported, showed that the other two components expressing each type of conflict (i.e., the lexical component of task conflict and the indirect informational conflict were small, and unstable. The present analysis refines our knowledge of the origins of Stroop interference by providing evidence that each type of conflict has its major and minor contributions. The implications for cognitive control of an automatic reading process are also discussed.

  12. Does long-term object priming depend on the explicit detection of object identity at encoding?

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    Carlos Alexandre Gomes

    2015-03-01

    Full Text Available It is currently unclear whether objects have to be explicitly identified at encoding for reliable behavioural long-term object priming to occur. We conducted two experiments that investigated long-term object and non-object priming using a selective-attention encoding manipulation that reduces explicit object identification. In Experiment 1, participants either counted dots flashed within an object picture (shallow encoding or engaged in an animacy task (deep encoding at study, whereas, at test, they performed an object-decision task. Priming, as measured by reaction times, was observed for both types of encoding, and was of equivalent magnitude. In Experiment 2, non-object priming (faster reaction times for studied relative to unstudied non-objects was also obtained under the same selective-attention encoding manipulation as in Experiment 1, and the magnitude of the priming effect was equivalent between experiments. In contrast, we observed a linear decrement in recognition memory accuracy across conditions (deep encoding of Experiment 1 > shallow encoding Experiment 1 > shallow encoding of Experiment 2, suggesting that priming was not contaminated by explicit memory strategies. We argue that our results are more consistent with the identification/production framework than the perceptual/conceptual distinction, and we conclude that priming of pictures largely ignored at encoding can be subserved by the automatic retrieval of two types of instances: one at the motor-level and another at an object-decision level.

  13. Mechanisms underlying alcohol approach action tendencies: the role of emotional primes and drinking motives

    OpenAIRE

    Janna eCousijn; Janna eCousijn; Maartje eLuijten; Maartje eLuijten; Reinout eWiers

    2014-01-01

    The tendency to approach alcohol-related stimuli is known as the alcohol approach bias and has been related to heavy alcohol use. It is currently unknown whether the alcohol approach bias is more pronounced after emotional priming. The main aim of this study was to investigate whether positive and negative emotional primes would modulate the alcohol approach bias. For this purpose a new contextual Emotional Prime - Approach Avoidance Task (EP-AAT) was developed, containing both negative and p...

  14. Neural changes associated with semantic processing in healthy aging despite intact behavioral performance.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lacombe, Jacinthe; Jolicoeur, Pierre; Grimault, Stephan; Pineault, Jessica; Joubert, Sven

    2015-10-01

    Semantic memory recruits an extensive neural network including the left inferior prefrontal cortex (IPC) and the left temporoparietal region, which are involved in semantic control processes, as well as the anterior temporal lobe region (ATL) which is considered to be involved in processing semantic information at a central level. However, little is known about the underlying neuronal integrity of the semantic network in normal aging. Young and older healthy adults carried out a semantic judgment task while their cortical activity was recorded using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Despite equivalent behavioral performance, young adults activated the left IPC to a greater extent than older adults, while the latter group recruited the temporoparietal region bilaterally and the left ATL to a greater extent than younger adults. Results indicate that significant neuronal changes occur in normal aging, mainly in regions underlying semantic control processes, despite an apparent stability in performance at the behavioral level. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  15. Effective Connectivity between Ventral Occipito-Temporal and Ventral Inferior Frontal Cortex during Lexico-Semantic Processing. A Dynamic Causal Modeling Study

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    Marcela Perrone-Bertolotti

    2017-06-01

    Full Text Available It has been suggested that dorsal and ventral pathways support distinct aspects of language processing. Yet, the full extent of their involvement and their inter-regional connectivity in visual word recognition is still unknown. Studies suggest that they might reflect the dual-route model of reading, with the dorsal pathway more involved in grapho-phonological conversion during phonological tasks, and the ventral pathway performing lexico-semantic access during semantic tasks. Furthermore, this subdivision is also suggested at the level of the inferior frontal cortex, involving ventral and dorsal parts for lexico-semantic and phonological processing, respectively. In the present study, we assessed inter-regional brain connectivity and task-induced modulations of brain activity during a phoneme detection and semantic categorization tasks, using fMRI in healthy subject. We used a dynamic causal modeling approach to assess inter-regional connectivity and task demand modulation within the dorsal and ventral pathways, including the following network components: the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (vOTC; dorsal and ventral, the superior temporal gyrus (STG; dorsal, the dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG; dorsal, and the ventral IFG (vIFG; ventral. We report three distinct inter-regional interactions supporting orthographic information transfer from vOTC to other language regions (vOTC -> STG, vOTC -> vIFG and vOTC -> dIFG regardless of task demands. Moreover, we found that (a during semantic processing (direct ventral pathway the vOTC -> vIFG connection strength specifically increased and (b a lack of modulation of the vOTC -> dIFG connection strength by the task that could suggest a more general involvement of the dorsal pathway during visual word recognition. Results are discussed in terms of anatomo-functional connectivity of visual word recognition network.

  16. Positional priming of pop-out is nested in visuospatial context.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gokce, Ahu; Müller, Hermann J; Geyer, Thomas

    2013-11-26

    The present study investigated facilitatory and inhibitory positional priming using a variant of Maljkovic and Nakayama's (1996) priming of pop-out task. Here, the singleton target and the distractors could be presented in different visuospatial contexts-but identical screen locations-across trials, permitting positional priming based on individual locations to be disentangled from priming based on interitem configural relations. The results revealed both significant facilitatory priming, i.e., faster reaction times (RTs) to target presented at previous target relative to previously empty locations, and inhibitory priming, i.e., slower RTs to target at previous distractor relative to previously empty locations. However, both effects were contingent on repetitions versus changes of stimulus arrangement: While facilitation of target locations was dependent on the repetition of the exact item configuration (e.g., T-type followed by T-type stimulus arrangement), the inhibitory effect was more "tolerant," being influenced by repetitions versus changes of the item's visuospatial category (T-type followed by Z-type pattern; cf. Garner & Clement, 1963). The results suggest that facilitatory and inhibitory priming are distinct phenomena (Finke et al., 2009) and that both effects are sensitive to subtle information about the arrangement of the display items (Geyer, Zehetleitner, & Müller, 2010). The results are discussed with respect to the stage(s) of visual pop-out search that are influenced by positional priming.

  17. Maternal talk in cognitive development: relations between psychological lexicon, semantic development, empathy and temperament

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Dolores eRollo

    2016-03-01

    Full Text Available In this study, we investigated the relationship between mothers’ psychological lexicon and children’s cognitive and socio-emotive development as assessed through conceptual and semantic understanding tasks, in addition to the traditional tasks of theory of mind. Currently, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the frequency of mothers’ mental state words used in mother-child picture-book reading is linked with children’s theory of mind skills. Furthermore, mothers’ use of cognitive terms is more strongly related to children’s theory of mind performances than the mothers’ references to other mental states, such as desires or emotions (Rollo, Buttiglieri, 2009. Current literature has established that early maternal input is related to later child mental state understanding; however it has not yet clarified which maternal terms are most useful for the socio-emotional and cognitive development of the child, and which aspect of the cognitive development benefits from the mother-child interaction.The present study addresses this issue and focuses on the relationship between mothers’ mental state talk and children’s behavior in conceptual and semantic tasks, and in a theory of mind task.In this study fifty pairs consisting of mothers and their 3 to 6-year-old children participated in two sessions: (1 The mothers read a picture book to their children. To assess the maternal psychological lexicon, their narrative was codified according to the categories of mental state references used in literature: perceptual, emotional, volitional, cognitive, moral and communicative. (2 After a few days, the conceptual and semantic skills of the children (tasks of contextualization and classification, memory and definition of words and their psychological lexicon were assessed.The results suggest close links between the frequency and variety of mothers’ mental state words and some semantic and conceptual skills of children.

  18. Semantic Indexing of Medical Learning Objects: Medical Students' Usage of a Semantic Network.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tix, Nadine; Gießler, Paul; Ohnesorge-Radtke, Ursula; Spreckelsen, Cord

    2015-11-11

    The Semantically Annotated Media (SAM) project aims to provide a flexible platform for searching, browsing, and indexing medical learning objects (MLOs) based on a semantic network derived from established classification systems. Primarily, SAM supports the Aachen emedia skills lab, but SAM is ready for indexing distributed content and the Simple Knowledge Organizing System standard provides a means for easily upgrading or even exchanging SAM's semantic network. There is a lack of research addressing the usability of MLO indexes or search portals like SAM and the user behavior with such platforms. The purpose of this study was to assess the usability of SAM by investigating characteristic user behavior of medical students accessing MLOs via SAM. In this study, we chose a mixed-methods approach. Lean usability testing was combined with usability inspection by having the participants complete four typical usage scenarios before filling out a questionnaire. The questionnaire was based on the IsoMetrics usability inventory. Direct user interaction with SAM (mouse clicks and pages accessed) was logged. The study analyzed the typical usage patterns and habits of students using a semantic network for accessing MLOs. Four scenarios capturing characteristics of typical tasks to be solved by using SAM yielded high ratings of usability items and showed good results concerning the consistency of indexing by different users. Long-tail phenomena emerge as they are typical for a collaborative Web 2.0 platform. Suitable but nonetheless rarely used keywords were assigned to MLOs by some users. It is possible to develop a Web-based tool with high usability and acceptance for indexing and retrieval of MLOs. SAM can be applied to indexing multicentered repositories of MLOs collaboratively.

  19. Task choice and semantic interference in picture naming

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Piai, V.; Roelofs, A.P.A.; Schriefers, H.J.

    2015-01-01

    Evidence from dual-task performance indicates that speakers prefer not to select simultaneous responses in picture naming and another unrelated task, suggesting a response selection bottleneck in naming. In particular, when participants respond to tones with a manual response and name pictures with

  20. Implicit and explicit processing in deep dyslexia: Semantic blocking as a test for failure of inhibition in the phonological output lexicon.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Colangelo, Annette; Buchanan, Lori

    2006-12-01

    The failure of inhibition hypothesis posits a theoretical distinction between implicit and explicit access in deep dyslexia. Specifically, the effects of failure of inhibition are assumed only in conditions that have an explicit selection requirement in the context of production (i.e., aloud reading). In contrast, the failure of inhibition hypothesis proposes that implicit processing and explicit access to semantic information without production demands are intact in deep dyslexia. Evidence for intact implicit and explicit access requires that performance in deep dyslexia parallels that observed in neurologically intact participants on tasks based on implicit and explicit processes. In other words, deep dyslexics should produce normal effects in conditions with implicit task demands (i.e., lexical decision) and on tasks based on explicit access without production (i.e., forced choice semantic decisions) because failure of inhibition does not impact the availability of lexical information, only explicit retrieval in the context of production. This research examined the distinction between implicit and explicit processes in deep dyslexia using semantic blocking in lexical decision and forced choice semantic decisions as a test for the failure of inhibition hypothesis. The results of the semantic blocking paradigm support the distinction between implicit and explicit processing and provide evidence for failure of inhibition as an explanation for semantic errors in deep dyslexia.