Intraexperimental development of priming and event related potentials effects with abstract geometrical stimuli

Abstract

In the current study we assessed the possibility of developing intraexperimentally behavioral priming and Event Related Potentials (ERP) effects that are often studied with stimuli to which participants typically have a very extensive pre-experimental history, like words. To do so we used abstract geometrical figures in a baseline Lexical Decision Task (LDT), followed by a conditional discrimination-training phase. We then repeated the LDT task to assess the effectiveness of training compared to baseline. We found that participants’ reaction time data in the post training LDT session changed, compared to the pre-training LDT session, according to the specific conditional discriminations taught in the training session. Similarly, neural results suggest the presence of an effect due to training that is absent in the baseline neural measures. Moreover, similar effects were also obtained using words. Results point to the possibility that conditional discrimination learning may be sufficient to establish effects that are often considered to be language specific.