Abstract
Most current studies investigating semantic memory have focused on associative (ring-emerald) or taxonomic relations (bird-sparrow). Little is known about the question of how causal relations (virus- epidemic) are stored and accessed in semantic memory. The goal of this study was to examine the processing of causally related, general associatively related and hierarchically related word pairs when participants were required to evaluate whether pairs of words were related in any way. The ERP data showed that the N400 amplitude (200-500ms) elicited by unrelated related words was more negative than all related words. Furthermore, the late frontal distributed negativity (500-700ms) elicited by causally related words was smaller than hierarchically related words, but not for general associated words. These results suggested the processing of causal relations and hierarchical relations in semantic memory recruited different degrees of cognitive resources, especially for role binding.
Highlights
The ability to use knowledge of causal relations to plan, act and reason is one of the most fundamental attributes of human cognition [1]
Post hoc pair-wise comparison showed that the reaction time (RT) for hierarchically related (M = 601ms, SD = 79ms) were shorter than unrelated words (M = 700 ms, SD = 90 ms), p =
For the N400 at 300–500ms, there was no significant difference for the repetition effect for casually related words: F (1, 14) = 1.27, p = .28, ηp2 = .08, hierarchically related words: F (1, 14) = 2.10, p = .17, ηp2 = .13, associatively related words: F (1, 14) = 1.56, p = .23, ηp2 = .10, and unrelated word pairs: F (1, 14) = .24, p = .63, ηp2 =
Summary
The ability to use knowledge of causal relations to plan, act and reason is one of the most fundamental attributes of human cognition [1]. Neural studies have begun to use a variety of neuroimaging techniques to investigate brain areas that appear sensitive to causal processing [2], such as causal perception [3,4], learning new causal relations [5,6] and causal inferences in text processing [7]. Some types of causal relations present in the environment may be immediately apparent through perceptual causation (e.g., causal perception), whereas other types of causal relations are likely learned through experience [2]. The present study sets out to further investigate how stored causal relations (along with non-causal associations) are represented and accessed in semantic memory.
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