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

ABSTRACT: 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, non-synonymously related words, or unrelated words. All stimuli were pres

SUBMITTER: Deacon D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3874853 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature