Abstract
The repetition of a stimulus leads to shorter reaction times as well as to the reduction of neural activity. Previous encounters with closely related stimuli (primes) also lead to faster and often to more accurate processing of subsequent stimuli (targets). For instance, if the prime is a name, and the target is a face, the recognition of a persons’ face is facilitated by prior presentation of his/her name. A possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the prime allows predicting the occurrence of the target. To the best of our knowledge, so far, no study tested the neural correlates of such cross-domain priming with fMRI. To fill this gap, here we used names of famous persons as primes, and congruent or incongruent faces as targets. We found that congruent primes not only reduced RT, but also lowered the BOLD signal in bilateral fusiform (FFA) and occipital (OFA) face areas. This suggests that semantic information affects not only behavioral performance, but also neural responses in relatively early processing stages of the occipito-temporal cortex. We interpret our results in the framework of predictive coding theories.
Highlights
The repeated presentation of a given stimulus leads to several behavioral and neural consequences
Our major finding is that faces of familiar persons, seen after Congruent names, led to significantly lower functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal in fusiform face area (FFA) and occipital face area (OFA)
These results clearly show that the neural activity of FFA and OFA is modulated by prior semantic information, just as these regions are affected by previously presented abstract cues[20,37,39]
Summary
The repeated presentation of a given stimulus leads to several behavioral and neural consequences. Both macaque and human experiments have shown that stimulus repetition reduces single-cell activity[3,4], the amplitude of event-related potential (ERP) components[5], as well as the magnitude of the blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments[6]. This response reduction is typically referred to as repetition suppression (RS) while in the neuroimaging literature, it is often referred to as fMRI adaptation (fMRIa7). This region was found to be sensitive to the repetition of a given object when its name was visually or auditorily presented
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