Automatic Spreading Activation Research Articles

The Impact of Adding a Fourth Item to the Traditional 3-Item Remote Associates Test

ABSTRACT The compound Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a classic measure of creativity. Participants are shown three cue words (sore-shoulder-sweat) and asked to generate a word that connects them (cold). Theoretical views of RAT performance differ in the degree to which they conceptualize performance as depending on automatic spreading activation across semantic networks, strategic generation of bi-associations, and other analytical processes (e.g. executive processes that support fluid intelligence). We tested these views by adding a fourth cue word to determine whether it impaired RAT accuracy (e.g. generation of bi-associations), impaired response times (analytic processes), or improved RAT accuracy without changing response times (e.g. spreading activation). Across four experiments, 551 adults completed 3- and 4-item RAT trials that were matched on linguistic and semantic metrics. Across experiments, adding the fourth word improved accuracy by 27.91%. This performance gain occurred with either modest or no changes to response times or ratings of insight/strategy use. Interestingly, the fourth word predominantly benefited accuracy and response times on difficult trials; on easy trials, the fourth word impaired or did not change performance. The findings suggest that both automatic and strategic/analytical processes contribute to successful RAT performance, with relative dependence on these processes dynamically adapting to the demands of the individual trial.

Neural correlates of semantic matching in indirect priming

Electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging studies have demonstrated the role of a left temporo-parietal brain network in prospective processing during direct priming (“body” – “hand”) using a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). In contrast, indirect priming (“lion” – “stripes” related through “tiger”) has been related to the activation of right hemisphere regions such as the supramarginal and middle frontal gyri and the insula involved in automatic semantic processing. Postlexical retrospective strategies like semantic matching, compound cue or episodic retrieval have been largely neglected even though there is consistent evidence of their contribution to direct and indirect priming. The present study was designed to map the brain regions participating in semantic priming based on postlexical retrospective semantic matching. 16 right-handed Spanish speakers (ages 20–40, 50 % male) were given a visual lexical decision task in a 1.5 T scanner with a TR of 3.5 s to obtain BOLD activations. In order to reduce the effects of automatic spreading activation on priming we used a long SOA (800 ms). To minimize the effects of expectancy, we increased the related-unrelated ratio to 1:2 (20 related, 40 unrelated, 20 pseudowords) and employed an indirect priming paradigm with weakly associated targets to enhance the effects of semantic matching. Each 3500 ms trial consisted on a fixation screen for 1000 ms followed by a 100 ms black screen, then the prime word for 600 ms, another black screen for 200 ms, the target word/pseudoword for 600 ms and finally a response screen for 1000 ms. Response time was longer for pseudowords compared to related and unrelated targets. An increased activity was found in lIFG for related pairs and pseudowords, whereas a large cluster of activation was found in left fusiform gyrus for unrelated pairs. Right insula was also activated for unrelated and pseudoword conditions. Furthermore, all conditions showed a decreased activity in left precuneus/parieto-occipital sulcus. These data addressed the role of frontal, temporal, parietal and insular regions in retrospective semantic matching with a differential pattern according to the lexical retrieval, selection and inhibition processes required to make a lexical decision.

Priming and persistence in bilinguals: What codeswitching tells us about lexical priming in sentential contexts*

AbstractMost studies on lexical priming have examined single words presented in isolation, despite language users rarely encountering words in such cases. The present study builds upon this by examining both within-language identity priming and across-language translation priming in sentential contexts. Highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals read sentence-question pairs, where the sentence contained the prime and the question contained the target. At earlier stages of processing, we find evidence only of within-language identity priming; at later stages of processing, however, across-language translation priming surfaces, and becomes as strong as within-language identity priming. Increasing the time between the prime sentence and target question results in strengthened priming at the latest stages of processing. These results replicate previous findings at the single-word level but do so within sentential contexts, which has implications both for accounts of priming via automatic spreading activation as well as for accounts of persistence attested in spontaneous speech corpora.

Mapping the time course of semantic activation in mediated false memory: Immediate classification, naming, and recognition.

We evaluated the time course of persistent automatic spreading activation from a mediated list of indirect associates (e.g., meow, day, and basement) that all converged upon a non-presented critical item (CI; e.g., black). Mediated lists were related to CIs through non-presented mediators (e.g., cat, night, and bottom). Three speeded tasks were used to evaluate the time course of semantic activation of the CI: a continuous semantic classification task (concrete/abstract decisions), a naming task (reading words aloud), or a recognition test (old/new memory decisions). Test lists were presented immediately following the mediated lists, and CIs were presented in the first, third, or eighth positions. The results revealed that in both the classification and naming tasks, CI priming was greatest in the first test position and declined across the remaining test positions. Importantly, priming was statistically reliable in the late test positions, providing evidence for long-term semantic priming (i.e., across positions on immediate tasks). False recognition, however, was stable across test positions. Collectively, these patterns suggest that spreading-activation processes decline, consistent with implicit spreading activation, and these processes may contribute to long-term false recognition.

Do visible semantic primes preactivate lexical representations?

Considerable research effort has been devoted to investigating semantic priming effects, particularly, the locus of those effects. Semantically related primes might activate their target's lexical representation (through automatic spreading activation at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), or through generation of words expected to follow the prime at longer SOAs). Alternately, semantically related primes might aid responding after target identification (i.e., postlexically). In contrast, masked orthographic priming effects appear to be lexical and automatic. Lexical processing of targets is facilitated by orthographically similar nonword primes and often inhibited by orthographically similar word primes (Davis & Lupker, 2006). Using the lexical-decision task (LDT), we found additivity between the facilitative effects of visible semantic primes and the facilitative effects of masked orthographically similar nonword primes at long and short SOAs, consistent with a postlexical locus of the semantic priming effects. Also consistent with this conclusion, semantic primes affected the skew of the distribution (larger effects on longer latency trials), whereas masked orthographic primes did not. In a final experiment, visible primes that were semantically related to the masked orthographic word primes did not make those primes more effective lexical inhibitors of orthographically similar targets (independent of SOA). Taken together, our findings suggest that the impact of a semantic prime is not to increase the lexical activation of related concepts. Rather, they suggest that the locus of semantic priming effects in LDTs is postlexical, in that discovering the existence of a relationship between the prime and target biases participants to make a "word" response. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Do shared semantic features facilitate Lexical-semantic processing in early course psychosis?

ABSTRACTThe lexical-semantic relatedness effect supposes different activation in the semantic memory of related versus unrelated word-pairs. Semantically related pairs are considered to result in a larger spread of activation as the activation of concept nodes is dependent on shared lexical-semantic features of concepts. The increased activation of concepts in the semantic memory in individuals with schizophrenia is found to be, faster spreading and lacking in inhibition in relation to healthy control subjects. The aim of this study was to examine whether the lexical-semantic relatedness effect influences processing in individuals with early course psychosis by utilizing an explicit semantic matching task with 0ms SOA (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony) to analyse the strategy-free automatic spreading activation process. Overall, the patient group had lower accuracy and longer reaction times compared with healthy subjects, as well as better accuracy for related word-pairs and longer reaction times are for unrelated word-pairs. In clinical practice, the determination of language classifiers for early course psychosis could potentially enable the creation of reliable diagnostic markers and instruments for identifying the population with an elevated risk ofdeveloping disorders within a spectrum of schizophrenia, and predicting the course of the disorder.

Antecedent access mechanisms in pronoun processing: evidence from the N400

ABSTRACTPrevious cross-modal priming studies showed that lexical decisions to words after a pronoun were facilitated when these words were semantically related to the pronoun's antecedent. These studies suggested that semantic priming effectively measured antecedent retrieval during coreference. We examined whether these effects extended to implicit reading comprehension using the N400 response. The results of three experiments did not yield strong evidence of semantic facilitation due to coreference. Further, the comparison with two additional experiments showed that N400 facilitation effects were reduced in sentences (vs. word pair paradigms) and were modulated by the case morphology of the prime word. We propose that priming effects in cross-modal experiments may have resulted from task-related strategies. More generally, the impact of sentence context and morphological information on priming effects suggests that they may depend on the extent to which the upcoming input is predicted, rather than automatic spreading activation between semantically related words.

N400 amplitude does not recover from disappearance after repetitions despite reinitiated semantic integration difficulty.

It remains an open question whether the amplitude of N400 reflects combinatory postlexical semantic integration processing. To examine the issue, we repeatedly presented strictly simplified, N400-eliciting three-word structures for seven times, mixed with their plausible counterparts, followed immediately by a much more enriched and informative sentence containing two keywords of the incongruous structure, for the purpose of reinitiating semantic integration processing. Event-related potentials were recorded and compared at the first, fourth, seventh, and eighth time. It was found that multiple repetitions attenuated the N400 effect to almost nonexistent and that the follow-up semantic integration reinitiating sentence did not recover N400 amplitude. The results suggest that combinatory postlexical semantic integration does not significantly modulate N400 amplitude, and provide evidence for noncombinatory processes underlying N400 such as automatic spreading activation and expectancy/prediction.

Can False Memories Prime Problem Solutions for Healthy Older Adults and Those With Alzheimer's Disease?

Recent research has shown that false memories can have a positive consequence on human cognition in both children and young adults. The present experiment investigated whether false memories could have similar positive effects by priming solutions to insight-based problems in healthy older adults and people with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Participants were asked to solve compound remote associate task (CRAT) problems, half of which had been preceded by the presentation of Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists whose critical lures (CL) were also the solutions to those problems. The results showed that regardless of cognitive ability, when the CL was falsely recognized, CRAT problems were solved more often and reliably faster than problems that were not primed by a DRM list. When the CL was not falsely recognized, CRAT problem solution rates and times were no different from when there was no DRM priming. These findings are consistent with predictions from theories of associative activation and demonstrate the importance of automatic spreading activation processes in memory across the life span.

The impact of auditory white noise on semantic priming

It has been proposed that white noise can improve cognitive performance for some individuals, particularly those with lower attention, and that this effect may be mediated by dopaminergic circuitry. Given existing evidence that semantic priming is modulated by dopamine, this study investigated whether white noise can facilitate semantic priming. Seventy-eight adults completed an auditory semantic priming task with and without white noise, at either a short or long inter-stimulus interval (ISI). Measures of both direct and indirect semantic priming were examined. Analysis of the results revealed significant direct and indirect priming effects at each ISI in noise and silence, however noise significantly reduced the magnitude of indirect priming. Analyses of subgroups with higher versus lower attention revealed a reduction to indirect priming in noise relative to silence for participants with lower executive and orienting attention. These findings suggest that white noise focuses automatic spreading activation, which may be driven by modulation of dopaminergic circuitry.

The priming of priming: Evidence that the N400 reflects context-dependent post-retrieval word integration in working memory

Which cognitive processes are reflected by the N400 in ERPs is still controversial. Various recent articles (Lau et al., 2008; Brouwer et al., 2012) have revived the idea that only lexical pre-activation processes (such as automatic spreading activation, ASA) are strongly supported, while post-lexical integrative processes are not. Challenging this view, the present ERP study replicates a behavioral study by McKoon and Ratcliff (1995) who demonstrated that a prime-target pair such as finger − hand shows stronger priming when a majority of other pairs in the list share the analogous semantic relationship (here: part-whole), even at short stimulus onset asynchronies (250ms). We created lists with four different types of semantic relationship (synonyms, part-whole, category-member, and opposites) and compared priming for pairs in a consistent list with those in an inconsistent list as well as unrelated items. Highly significant N400 reductions were found for both relatedness priming (unrelated vs. inconsistent) and relational priming (inconsistent vs. consistent). These data are taken as strong evidence that N400 priming effects are not exclusively carried by ASA-like mechanisms during lexical retrieval but also include post-lexical integration in working memory. We link the present findings to a neurocomputational model for relational reasoning (Knowlton et al., 2012) and to recent discussions of context-dependent conceptual activations (Yee and Thompson-Schill, 2016).

The Influence of Masked Stimuli on Response Selection: Evidence from a Semantic Categorization Task.

Unconscious visual stimuli can be processed by human observers and influence their behaviour. A striking example is a phenomenon known as "free-choice priming," where masked "prime" stimuli-of which participants are unaware-modulate which of two response alternatives they are likely to choose. Recent efforts to uncover the mechanisms underlying this intriguing effect have revealed that free-choice priming can emerge even in the absence of automatized stimulus-response (S-R) associations between masked primes and specific motor responses, indicating that free choices can be influenced by a masked prime's meaning (Ocampo, 2015). It remains unknown, however, whether masked primes bias response selections because they are implicitly classified according to task instructions, or because spreading activation occurs within the prime's semantic network. To adjudicate between these two possibilities, participants in the present experiment categorised targets as either animals or people and selected which of two response alternatives they wanted to make following presentation of a free-choice target. Crucially, while implicit classifications could proceed during processing of both animal and person masked primes, only animal primes could trigger spreading activation within their semantic network. This manipulation modulated free-choice priming; only masked animal primes influenced response selections to free-choice targets. This result indicates that an automatic spreading activation mechanism might underlie a masked prime's ability to influence free-choice responses.

Is semantic priming (ir)rational? Insights from the speeded word fragment completion task.

Semantic priming, the phenomenon that a target is recognized faster if it is preceded by a semantically related prime, is a well-established effect. However, the mechanisms producing semantic priming are subject of debate. Several theories assume that the underlying processes are controllable and tuned to prime utility. In contrast, purely automatic processes, like automatic spreading activation, should be independent of the prime's usefulness. The present study sought to disentangle both accounts by creating a situation where prime processing is actually detrimental. Specifically, participants were asked to quickly complete word fragments with either the letter a or e (e.g., sh_ve to be completed as shave). Critical fragments were preceded by a prime that was either related (e.g., push) or unrelated (write) to a prohibited completion of the target (e.g., shove). In 2 experiments, we found a significant inhibitory priming effect, which is inconsistent with purely "rational" explanations of semantic priming. (PsycINFO Database Record

Word-pair priming with biased homonyms: N400 and LPC effects

Abstract In an ERP investigation of biased homonym processing in minimal context, isolated homonym primes (e.g., ruler) preceded targets that were associated with either the dominant (e.g., inch) or subordinate (e.g., king) meaning of the homonym, were unrelated words (e.g., claw), or were nonwords (e.g., smole), presented 250 ms later in a lexical decision paradigm. Both dominant and subordinate associates elicited smaller amplitude N400s and LPCs than unrelated word targets. The N400 priming effect was greater for dominant than subordinate associates, reflecting sensitivity to meaning frequency and lexical competition between the two homonym meanings. The LPC priming effect was similar for dominant and subordinate associates, reflecting post-lexical relational processing between prime and target. In this paradigm, priming effects of meaning frequency due to automatic spreading activation extended only to the N400 time window; shortly thereafter, effects of lexical dominance disappeared and reprocessing of the binary relatedness of the homonym prime and subsequent word target took precedence.

Insightful Imagery is Related to Working Memory Updating

Available body of evidence concerning the relationship between insight problem solving and working memory (WM) is ambiguous. Several authors propose that restructuring of the problem representation requires controlled search processes, which needs planning and involvement of WM. Other researchers suggest that the restructuring is achieved through the automatic spread of activation in long-term memory, assigning a limited role to WM capacity. In the present study we examined the correlations between insight problem solving performance and measures of WM updating function (n-back task), including general intelligence (as measured by Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices). The results revealed that updating function shared up to 30% of variance with the insight problem task performance, even when the influence of general mental ability was controlled for. These results suggest that insight problem solving is constrained by individual ability to update the content of WM.

Automatic and Controlled Semantic Retrieval: TMS Reveals Distinct Contributions of Posterior Middle Temporal Gyrus and Angular Gyrus.

We demonstrate a novel functional dissociation between the angular gyrus (AG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) in conceptual processing. These sites are often coactivated during neuroimaging studies using semantic tasks, but their individual contributions are unclear. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation and tasks designed to assess different aspects of semantics (item identity and thematic matching), we tested two alternative theoretical accounts. Neither site showed the pattern expected for a "thematic hub" (i.e., a site storing associations between concepts) since stimulation disrupted both tasks. Instead, the data indicated that pMTG contributes to the controlled retrieval of conceptual knowledge, while AG is critical for the efficient automatic retrieval of specific semantic information.

Creativity and positive symptoms in schizophrenia revisited: Structural connectivity analysis with diffusion tensor imaging

Both creativity and schizotypy are suggested to be manifestations of the hyperactivation of unusual or remote concepts/words. However, the results of studies on creativity in schizophrenia are diverse, possibly due to the multifaceted aspects of creativity and difficulties of differentiating adaptive creativity from pathological schizotypy/positive symptoms. To date, there have been no detailed studies comprehensively investigating creativity, positive symptoms including delusions, and their neural bases in schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated 43 schizophrenia and 36 healthy participants using diffusion tensor imaging. We used idea, design, and verbal (semantic and phonological) fluency tests as creativity scores and Peters Delusions Inventory as delusion scores. Subsequently, we investigated group differences in every psychological score, correlations between fluency and delusions, and relationships between these scores and white matter integrity using tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS). In schizophrenia, idea and verbal fluency were significantly lower in general, and delusion score was higher than in healthy controls, whereas there were no group differences in design fluency. We also found positive correlation between phonological fluency and delusions in schizophrenia. By correlation analyses using TBSS, we found that the anterior part of corpus callosum was the substantially overlapped area, negatively correlated with both phonological fluency and delusion severity. Our results suggest that the anterior interhemispheric dysconnectivity might be associated with executive dysfunction, and disinhibited automatic spreading activation in the semantic network was manifested as uncontrollable phonological fluency or delusions. This dysconnectivity could be one possible neural basis that differentiates pathological positive symptoms from adaptive creativity.

Thresholds of visibility for masked lexical, non-lexical, and non-linguistic items in aphasia

Thresholds of visibility for masked lexical, non-lexical, and non-linguistic items in aphasia

The masked semantic priming effect is task dependent: Reconsidering the automatic spreading activation process.

Semantic priming effects are popularly explained in terms of an automatic spreading activation process, according to which the activation of a node in a semantic network spreads automatically to interconnected nodes, preactivating a semantically related word. It is expected from this account that semantic priming effects should be routinely observed when the prime identity is veiled from conscious awareness, but the extant literature on masked semantic priming effects is notoriously mixed. The authors use the same prime-target pairs in the lexical decision task and the semantic categorization task and show that although masking the prime eliminates the semantic priming effect in lexical decision, reliable semantic priming effects are observed with both masked and unmasked primes in the semantic categorization task. The authors explain this task dependence in terms of their account of semantic priming effects based on notions of evidence accumulation and source confusion and support their account by means of reaction time distribution analyses.

Relatedness proportion effects in semantic categorization: Reconsidering the automatic spreading activation process.

Semantic priming effects at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony are commonly explained in terms of an automatic spreading activation process. According to this view, the proportion of related trials should have no impact on the size of the semantic priming effect. Using a semantic categorization task ("Is this a living thing?"), we show that on the contrary, there is a robust effect of relatedness proportion on the size of the semantic priming effect. This effect is not due to the participants using the prime to predict the target category/response, as manipulating the proportion of category/response-congruent trials produces a very different pattern. Taken together with response time distribution analysis, we argue that the semantic priming effect observed here is best explained in terms of an evidence accumulation process and source confusion between the prime and target.