N400 deficits from semantic matching of pictures in probands and first-degree relatives from multiplex schizophrenia families

An event-related potential study of semantic style-match judgments of artistic furniture

“…We inferred that the participants do not need to identify the style of a stimulus (e.g., Deconstruction) because they already knew what is a chair was before the experiment. Consequently, it is reasonable to suggest that the activation of the anterior regions reflects access to semantic knowledge (Guerra et al, 2009;Bobes et al, 1996).…”

“…This N400 waveform represents the semantic relationship between the current stimulus and the preceding context. Several studies of the N400 waveform were undertaken to index semantic integration processes, using the final word of a sentence as the stimulus (Andrews et al, 1993;Kutas and Hillyard, 1980;McCarley et al, 1991;Mitchell et al, 1991), picture-words (Greenham et al, 2003;Mathalon et al, 2002), pairs of words (Grillon et al, 1991;Koyama et al, 1994;Khateb et al, 2007;Núñez-Peña and Honrubia-Serrano, 2005;Pritchard et al, 1991;Weisbrod et al, 1998), pairs of pictures (Barrett and Rugg, 1990;Bobes et al, 1996;Ellis and Nelson, 1999;Guerra et al, 2009;Proverbio et al, 2007), and even incongruent human actions (Proverbio and Riva, 2009;Wu and Coulson, 2007) when the presented objects did not fit into any previously established semantic category.…”

“…In a number of ERP studies using categorization tasks, larger N400 effects were evoked during between-category comparisons (e.g., books vs. dogs) than during within-category comparisons (e.g., sheepdogs vs. golden retrievers) (Bobes et al, 1996;Mathalon et al, 2010;Guerra et al, 2009;Hamm et al, 2002;Proverbio et al, 2007). In natural within-category identification tasks, several studies of lexical categorization have demonstrated that the non-prototypical categories (e.g., shar-peis) elicited greater negative N400 effects than did the prototypical categories (e.g., golden retrievers) (Pritchard et al, 1991;Stuss et al, 1988).…”

Electrophysiological correlates of automatic spreading of activation in patients with psychotic disorder and first-degree relatives

“…reduced attention capacity, medication and chronic illness (Kimble et al, 2000;Morgan et al, 2006;Moritz et al, 1999). In at-risk populations, similar but less severe impairments have been found in several areas of language function, including semantic priming (Moritz et al, 1999) and word-pronunciation tasks (Kerns and Berenbaum, 2000), and these abnormalities may also be present at the level of the N400 component (Guerra et al, 2009;Niznikiewicz et al, 2004Niznikiewicz et al, , 1999. The aim of the current study was to extend these findings using a lexical decision paradigm with direct and indirect semantic associations in patients with psychotic disorder, first-degree relatives (siblings) and healthy controls.…”

Theories and Theorizers: A Contextual Approach to Theories of Cognition

“…Cognition might be explained in many ways, including mechanical, reductionist, and physical methods, and even teleological and emergentist explanations (see for example, Barutta et al 2010a). Finally, alternative approaches (Barutta et al 2010b) to orthodox computationalism, such as connectionism (Leech et al 2008), embodied, distributed and situated cognition (Anderson 2003;Smith and Collins 2009;Dufey et al 2010), social neuroscience (Decety and Lamm 2006), the contextual approach to cognition (Aravena et al 2010;Baker and Moya 1998;Cornejo et al 2009;Hurtado et al 2009;Guerra et al 2009;Ibáñez et al 2006;Ibáñez et al 2009a, b;Ibánez et al 2010a, b, c, d;Riveros et al 2010;San Martín et al 2010), ecological cognition (Turvey 2007), and dynamical approaches (Breakspear and Stam 2005), amongst others, are increasingly well known today in cognitive science (Cosmelli and Ibanez 2008). For these reasons, it is essential for meta-theoretical analysis to be sensitive both to the components of a theory that it is most possible to formalize and to the contextual framework of that theory.…”