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

ABSTRACT: The processing of causal relations has been constantly found to be asymmetrical once the roles of cause and effect are assigned to objects in interactions. We used a relationship recognition paradigm and recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) signals to explore the neural mechanism underlying the asymmetrical representations of causal relations in semantic memory. The results revealed that the verification of causal relations is faster if two words appear in "cause-effect" order (e.g., virus-epidemic) than if they appear in "effect-cause" order (e.g., epidemic-virus), whereas no such asymmetrical representation was found for the verification of hierarchical relations with reverse orders (e.g., bird-sparrow vs. sparrow-bird) in Experiment 1. Furthermore, the P2 amplitude elicited by "supero

SUBMITTER: Liang X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5134357 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature