An electrophysiological investigation of semantic priming with pictures of real objects

Abstract

Event-related potentials were recorded using color pictures of real objects. Participants made relatedness judgments for pictures that were highly, moderately, or unrelated to a picture of a preceding prime object (Experiment 1) or object identification decisions for related/easily identified, unrelated/easily identified, and unrelated/unidentifiable objects preceded by prime objects (Experiment 2). Unrelated pictures elicited larger event-related potential negativities between 225 and 500 ms than did related pictures, although the first portion of this epoch had a more frontal distribution than did the later portion. The later epoch differentiated the unrelated from the moderately related and the moderately related from the highly related pictures (Experiment 1), but the early epoch produced differences only between the unrelated and related pictures (Experiments 1 and 2). This pattern supports the existence of two separate components, an anterior, image-specific N300 and a later, central/parietal amodal N400.

Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: Insight from ERPs

“…This pattern of ERPs was in agreement with previous studies investigating the ERP responses in relation to object manipulability (Petit et al, 2006;Proverbio et al, 2011). The N300 may be sensitive to the recoverability of the object structure reflecting the access to both the conceptual representation system (Damasio et al, 1996;McPherson and Holcomb, 1999;Schendan and Kutas, 2007) and the motoric properties of the manipulable tools (Petit et al, 2006;Proverbio et al, 2011). Considering that the N300 may index the automatic activation of the motor schemata linked to the object's use (Petit et al, 2006;Proverbio et al, 2011) the larger negative deflection found for low affording tools may, therefore, reflect additional processing for stimuli for which it is more difficult to detect the correct motor Fig.…”

N200, N250r, and N400 Event-Related Brain Potentials Reveal Three Loci of Repetition Priming for Familiar Names.

“…For example, recent studies found topographical differences between N400 responses to pictures of objects and common names (Ganis, Kutas, & Sereno, 1996;McPherson & Holcomb, 1999). The present data do not suggest differences between N400 responses for cross-modality and within-modality priming.…”

Meaning and modality: Influences of context, semantic memory organization, and perceptual predictability on picture processing.

“…On the one hand, the difference may imply a nonidentity of the neural generators responsible for this component in the two cases. Alternatively, McPherson and Holcomb (1999) suggested that the distributional difference may be due to the partial overlap of a truly modality-independent N400 with an earlier, frontally distributed negativity (N300) that is particular to the processing of pictures (see also Holcomb & McPherson, 1994). Either account, however, seems incompatible with the strong form of common-code models, which assert that beyond early perceptual processing the analysis of pictures and words should be identical.…”