Electrophysiological difference between the representations of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory

The Temporal Order of Word Presentation Modulates the Amplitudes of P2 and N400 during Recognition of Causal Relations

“…All data were analyzed using SPSS 20.0. Similar to our previous study (Chen et al, 2015; Liang et al, 2015), the N400 amplitudes elicited by unrelated words were larger than causally related ( p < 0.001) and hierarchically related words ( p < 0.001; Bonferroni method). However, it seems that including the unrelated words (and the unrelated filler words) in the same analysis as the word order effect should have substantially diluted any possible word order effects on the responses to the related item types.…”

“…As a result, less than 6% of the data were lost due to artifacts, muscle potentials, and so on. Similar to our previous studies, we have labeled the word pairs as different marks when they are presented for the first time and when they are repeated in separate blocks, and there was no significant difference between them (Chen et al, 2014b, 2015). Thus, two types of stimulus were merged, which had the advantage of avoiding problems of category specificity and physical variance that are unavoidable when using large groups of words (Renoult, 2010).…”

“…Unlike in Experiment 1, however, our subjects did not appear to distinguish the role of cause and effect when queried about the presence of an associative relationship for the same causally related items. In other words, causal judgment might require a representation in which each word pair was mapped to specific roles of the cause or the effect, whereas no such mapping process is required for an associative judgment (Fenker et al, 2005; Chen et al, 2015). …”

“…Specifically, it is thought that the amplitude of the N400 component was sensitive to the strength of semantic relationships, as well as different types of semantic relationship, such as thematic vs. causal relationships (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980; Kuperberg et al, 2011; Kutas and Federmeier, 2011; Paczynski and Kuperberg, 2012; Chen et al, 2015; Wamain et al, 2015). For example, when participants were required to assess whether the relationship between subsequently presented words matched the initial causal cue, the N400 was smallest for causally related words, greater for associatively related words, and biggest for unrelated words, while keeping the level of semantic association constant across all tested conditions (Chen et al, 2015). Furthermore, studies have tried to link the N400 component to specific cognitive functions, such as prediction processing and role binding (Van Berkum et al, 2005; Kutas and Federmeier, 2011; Rabovsky and McRae, 2014).…”

How types of premises modulate the typicality effect in category-based induction: diverging evidence from the P2, P3, and LPC effects

“…Previous studies have found that the N400 effect was sensitive to the strength of semantic relations383940. In priming studies, for example, a larger N400 effect was elicited by unrelated or less-related words relative to related words41.…”