Linking semantic priming effect in functional MRI and event-related potentials

Electrophysiological correlates of visual affective priming

“…Also, Bostanov and Kotchoubey [3] found a negative wave, the N300, that indexed contextually incongruous exclamations, and interpreted this component as analogous to the well-known N400 response to semantically inappropriate words. Because semantically unrelated word pairs were found to produce more negative N400 than the related word pairs in many studies [12,28,34,35], our results also suggest that this previously known index (N400) of semantic priming should be extended to affective priming. Furthermore, a recent brain imaging study (fMRI) has shown that affective incongruity activates similar brain region as semantic incongruity [46].…”

“…They reported that semantically related target words evoked a smaller N400 (i.e., a negative component observed in ERPs around 400 msec after the target onset) than non-related targets, termed the N400 priming effect. The source of the N400 is thought to be localized to the superior temporal lobes, which are related to semantic processing [34]. The underlying mechanisms for this N400 priming effect have been interpreted in terms of spreading of activation within a semantic network (e.g., [13,14]) or integration of semantic information (e.g., [7,8,12]).…”

Abnormal cortical folding patterns within Broca's area in schizophrenia: Evidence from structural MRI

“…Its precise role is debated but it has been implicated in aspects of semantic processing including semantic encoding (Demb et al, 1995;Kirchhoff et al, 2000;Wagner et al, 1998), semantic priming (Copland et al, 2003;Giesbrecht et al, 2004;Kotz et al, 2002;Kuperberg et al, 2006b;Matsumoto et al, 2005;Wheatley et al, 2005), controlled semantic retrieval (Wagner et al, 2001), and semantic selection (Fletcher et al, 2000;Moss et al, 2005;Thompson-Schill et al, 1997;ThompsonSchill et al, 1999). Broca's area has also been implicated in phonological processing (Poldrack et al, 1999), aspects of syntactic processing (Caplan, 2001;Caplan et al, 2000), syntactic working memory (Fiebach et al, 2005) and, more generally, in other aspects of verbal working memory function (Barde and Thompson-Schill, 2002), and in speech output (Blank et al, 2002).…”

The Representation of Objects in the Brain, and Its Link with Semantic Memory and Language: a Conceptual Theory with the Support of a Neurocomputational Model

“…A widely shared idea, in fact, is that a category can be realized by objects which share some common features (for instance, "dog" and "cat" belong to the category "pet" and have many common characteristics). This idea is supported by experiments on the so-called "semantic priming", i.e., object recognition can be modulated by the previous recognition of another object which is "semantic congruent" (Rossell et al 2003;Matsumoto et al 2005). The explanation may be that the two objects activate some common neural structures, resulting in a classic priming phenomenon.…”

“…The present simulations (recognition of different simultaneous words and objects, even in the case of absent or corrupted features) represent just a few aspects of the potential model applications. Future challenges may be concerned with the following major issues, which have not been explicitly treated here due to space limitations: Semantic relationships among words -An important problem that can be simulated with the model consists in the semantic priming, i.e., the possibility that a previous word or a previous object (a cue) may affect (facilitate or depress) recognition of a subsequent word or subsequent object (a target) which is "semantically congruent" (Rossell et al 2003;Matsumoto et al 2005). This sort of priming mechanism, which may have important implication in language, may be simulated assuming that the two semantically congruent objects share some of their activated features, and that the representation of the first object is still partly active when the second object is presented to the network.…”