Facilitatory Priming Research Articles

What Fires Together, Wires Together: The Effect of Idiomatic Co-Occurrence on Lexical Networks

This study investigated the processing of lexical elements of idioms in isolation. Using visual word priming, spreading activation for idiomatically related word pairs (e.g., pop–question) was compared to that for semantically related (e.g., answer–question) and unrelated word pairs (e.g., trim–question) in two experiments varying in SOA (500 ms and 350 ms). In line with hybrid theories of idiom representation and processing, facilitatory priming was found in both experiments for idiomatic primes, suggesting a tight link between the words of an idiom that is mediated by a common idiom representation. While idiomatic priming was stable across SOAs, semantic priming was stronger for the short SOA, implying fast and early activation. In conclusion, one lexical element of an idiom can facilitate the processing of another, even if the elements are not presented within a phrasal context (i.e., within an idiom), and without the words being semantically related. We discuss our findings in light of theories about idiom processing, as well as current findings in the field of semantic priming.

An Evidence Accumulation Account of Masked Translation Priming in Two Bilingual Populations.

This manuscript addresses the phenomenon of masked priming and the cognitive process of switching from Spanish to English while reading in sequential bilingual texts compared to heritage speakers. A lexical decision task was employed in the present study with masked translation priming, which serves as a valuable tool for elucidating the orthographic and lexical processes involved in the initial stages of reading. This study builds upon previous research conducted on monolingual masked priming, which consistently demonstrates shifts in the response time (RT) distributions when comparing related and unrelated primes. Within the framework of a diffusion model, we implemented two theoretical positions. First, we posited that translation priming operates at the orthographic level, resulting in enhanced efficiency during the encoding process. Second, we explored the possibility that translation priming operates at the semantic level, influencing the accumulation of evidence during the lexical decision task. The findings of the present study indicate that translation priming elicits outcomes similar to those observed in monolingual priming paradigms. Specifically, we observed that translation priming facilitation is manifested as shifts in the RT distributions. These findings are interpreted to suggest that the benefits derived from the encoding process are not specific to the accessed lexicon following a brief stimulus presentation.

Environmentally responsible behaviour among the teachers: role of gratitude and perceived social responsibility

PurposeBased upon the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, this study aims to assess the role of perceived social responsibility (PSR) in mediating the relationship between gratitude and environmentally responsible behaviour (ERB) among teachers.Design/methodology/approachData were collected, following a correlational design, from a total of 292 school teachers in Kerala state, India. In total, 256 data were taken for final analysis. Out of the total participants, 63.3% were female and the remaining 36.7% were male. Confirmatory factor analysis was carried out to verify the factor structure and discriminant as well as convergent validity of the study variables. The relationship between gratitude and ERB with mediating role of PSR was tested.FindingsThe mediation analysis output revealed that PSR fully mediates the effect of gratitude on ERB, and it is concluded from the findings of the study that ERB can be enhanced by humanizing the citizens to integrate social responsibility in their acts and promoting the significance of having positive emotions like gratitude to widen their thought–action repertoires.Research limitations/implicationsIn line with the broaden-and-build theory, a positive state of mental faculty can be a prime facilitator to increase concern for green environments as an outcome of an expanded thought–action repertoire. The findings imply the importance of inculcating enduring personal resources like the sense of gratefulness as it weighs the effect of producing altruistic acts like ERB along with many other benefits associated with having a positive emotion which is obviously considered to be a fair contribution to serve social resources in the community.Social implicationsThe study findings can be an inspiration for the formation of policies to encourage pro-environmental behaviour and to further expansion of policies like national education policy of India. As teachers being the facilitators of knowledge and wisdom, they are potential sources to inspire students to practice healthy behaviours, they can be better models by practicing ERB.Originality/valueThe authors have verified the application of broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion in the context of ERB along with identifying its relationship with gratitude and PSR.

Barriers and Facilitators of Research in Pediatric Sports Medicine Practitioners: A Survey of the PRiSM Society.

Barriers and facilitators to research in sports medicine (SM) by physicians and allied health (AH) professions such as physical therapists and athletic trainers are understudied. The purpose of this research was to examine and compare research barriers, facilitators, and other research related facets including interests, comfort, knowledge, and resources among SM physicians and AH practitioners. Cross-sectional survey. The survey was sent to Pediatric Research in Sports Medicine (PRiSM) members. The survey was designed to ask respondents to identify their top barrier and facilitator to conducting research. Research interest (binary), self-rated comfort reading research articles (0-100 scale), self-rated knowledge conducting research independently (0-100 scale), and available research resources were evaluated. Descriptive statistics, chi-square, and t-tests were used to compare the responses between SM physicians and AH practitioners. The value of p<0.05 was set as a statistically significant criterion. The response rate was 35.7% (N=100). For both SM physicians and AH practitioners, the greatest research barrier was a lack of time. However, the leading research facilitators differed in the two professions. The top research facilitator for SM physicians was availability of research personnel, while availability of research mentoring was selected as a prime facilitator by AH practitioners. There were no differences in research interest between SM physicians (87.0%) and AH practitioners (95.5%, p=0.267). However, self-rated comfort reading research articles was higher in SM physicians (75.6±20.6) than AH practitioners (60.6±28.3, p=0.018). There were no differences in self-rated knowledge conducting research independently between SM physicians (70.2±18.6) and AH practitioners (63.4±24.6, p=0.163). Lack of time was the top research barrier for both SM physicians and AH practitioners. Regarding research facilitators, having available time was the main facilitator for SM physicians while availability of mentoring was the leading facilitator in AH practitioners. 3.

Semantic and Symbolic Cueing Effects on the Spatial Attenion Processes

In a given visual search task, repetition or switch of the target features affect the task performance differently. In the current study, the position of the target is manipulated across trials (trial n  trial n+1) and the target could appear at previous target, distractor or empty /neutral position. Positioning the target at the same position as in the previous trial, compared to neutral position, facilitates the target detection process, known as facilitatory priming effect. Positioning the target at previous distractor location, compared to neutral position, impairs the target detection process, known as inhibitory priming effect. The aim of the present study is to investigate modulations in the facilitatory and inhibitory priming effects,which are related to spatial attention processes, in the presence of different cue types (symbolic, semantic, neutral cues). One of the symbolic, semantic or neutral cues was presented prior to the display onset. The spatial cue could either indicate the location of the target or the distractor item. The cue pointing the target’s location generated the valid cue condition and the cue pointing one of the distractors’ location generated the invalid cue condition. Task performance was assessed by the reaction time dependent variable for the different cue types and cue validty conditions. The results revealed that cue validity and cue type factors affected the facilitatory and inhibitory priming effects differently. As the current study is the first one to investigate these factors, the findings have the potential to deepen the knowledge on spatial attention processes.

Investigating the locus of transposed-phoneme effects using cross-modal priming

In this study, we examined whether the facilitatory priming effect found when auditory primes and targets are related by a phoneme transposition (e.g., /ʀͻb/-/bͻʀ/: Dufour & Grainger, 2019, 2020) is also observed under cross-modal presentation. In two experiments using the same materials as in the previous studies, we found no evidence for a facilitatory priming effect when the targets were presented visually rather than auditorily. On the contrary, an inhibitory priming effect was found when both unrelated words (Experiment 1; e.g., /mas/-/bͻR/) and vowel overlap words (Experiment 2; e.g., /vͻl/-/bͻʀ/) were used as control conditions. In Experiment 2, this inhibitory effect was found to be equivalent in size whether the target words were of higher or lower frequency than the prime words (e.g. /ʀͻb/-/bͻʀ/ vs. /bͻʀ/-/ʀͻb/). We interpret this pattern of effects as reflecting the greater impact of word-level inhibition in cross-modal priming, and the parallel influence of prime-target relative frequency on bottom-up phoneme-to-word facilitation and word-level inhibition. Therefore, the facilitatory priming effect previously observed with auditory primes and targets would mainly reflect bottom-up activation of the target word representation during prime word processing.

Concurrent semantic priming and lexical interference for close semantic relations in blocked-cyclic picture naming: Electrophysiological signatures.

In the present study, we employed event-related brain potentials to investigate the effects of semantic similarity on different planning stages during language production. We manipulated semantic similarity by controlling feature overlap within taxonomical hierarchies. In a blocked-cyclic naming task, participants named pictures in repeated cycles, blocked in semantically close, distant, or unrelated conditions. Only closely related items, but not distantly related items, induced semantic blocking effects. In the first presentation cycle, naming was facilitated, and amplitude modulations in the N1 component around 140-180ms post-stimulus onset predicted this behavioral facilitation. In contrast, in later cycles, naming was delayed, and a negative-going posterior amplitude modulation around 250-350ms post-stimulus onset predicted this interference. These findings indicate easier object recognition or identification underlying initial facilitation and increased difficulties during lexical selection. The N1modulation was reduced but persisted in later cycles in which interference dominated, and the posterior negativity was also present in cycle 1 in which facilitation dominated, demonstrating concurrent effects of conceptual priming and lexical interference in all naming cycles. Our assumptions about the functional role these two opposing forces play in producing semantic context effects are further supported by the finding that the joint modulation of these two ERPs on naming latency exclusively emerged when naming closely related, but not unrelated items. The current findings demonstrate that close relations, but not distant taxonomic relations, induce stronger semantic blocking effects, and that temporally overlapping electrophysiological signatures reflect a trade-off between facilitatory priming and interfering lexical competition.

The subiculum sensitizes retrosplenial cortex layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons

Neurons in the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), a cerebral region that connects synaptically with various brain regions, are known to increase neuronal activity in accordance with hippocampal sharp wave-ripples. Pyramidal cells in granular RSC (gRSC) layer 2/3, but not layer 5, exhibit slowly ramping depolarization and considerably delayed spikes in response to a step-pulse current injection. The latencies of delayed spikes in RSC layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons were shortened by a preceding current injection. This effect was mimicked by activation of axonal afferents from the subiculum, but not of neocortical afferents. The subiculum is likely to facilitate information processing and flow in the RSC. The retrosplenial cortex (RSC), a cerebral region involved in diverse cognitive functions, is an anatomical hub that forms monosynaptic connections with various brain areas. Here, we report a unique form of short-term intrinsic plasticity in mouse granular RSC layer 2/3 pyramidal cells. These cells exhibited delayed spikes in response to somatic current injection, but the spike latencies were shortened by a preceding brief depolarization (priming). This priming-induced sensitization is distinct from desensitization, which is commonly observed in other cortical neurons. The facilitatory priming effect lasted for more than 3s, providing a time window for increased sensitivity to RSC inputs. Based on in vitro and in vivo patch-clamp recordings following optogenetic stimulation of axonal fibres, we found that preactivation of subicular afferents replicated the facilitatory priming effect. The results suggest that subicular inputs to RSC layer 2/3 neurons may modulate subsequent information integration in the RSC layer 2/3 circuits.

Enhanced antitumor immunity by a novel small molecule HPK1 inhibitor

BackgroundHematopoietic progenitor kinase 1 (HPK1 or MAP4K1) has been demonstrated as a negative intracellular immune checkpoint in mediating antitumor immunity in studies with HPK1 knockout and kinase dead mice. Pharmacological...

The subiculum sensitizes retrosplenial cortex layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons

Key points Neurons in the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), a cerebral region that connects synaptically with various brain regions, are known to increase neuronal activity in accordance with hippocampal sharp wave-ripples. Pyramidal cells in granular RSC (gRSC) layer 2/3, but not layer 5, exhibit slowly ramping depolarization and considerably delayed spikes in response to a step-pulse current injection. The latencies of delayed spikes in RSC layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons were shortened by a preceding current injection. This effect was mimicked by activation of axonal afferents from the subiculum, but not of neocortical afferents. The subiculum is likely to facilitate information processing and flow in the RSC. Abstract The retrosplenial cortex (RSC), a cerebral region involved in diverse cognitive functions, is an anatomical hub that forms monosynaptic connections with various brain areas. Here, we report a unique form of short-term intrinsic plasticity in mouse granular RSC layer 2/3 pyramidal cells. These cells exhibited delayed spikes in response to somatic current injection, but the spike latencies were shortened by a preceding brief depolarization (priming). This priming-induced sensitization is distinct from desensitization, which is commonly observed in other cortical neurons. The facilitatory priming effect lasted for more than 3 s, providing a time window for increased sensitivity to RSC inputs. Based on in vitro and in vivo patch-clamp recordings following optogenetic stimulation of axonal fibres, we found that preactivation of subicular afferents replicated the facilitatory priming effect. The results suggest that subicular inputs to RSC layer 2/3 neurons may modulate subsequent information integration in the RSC layer 2/3 circuits.

P178 rTMS facilitatory priming of the right unlesioned hemisphere maintained and generalized naming improvement induced by phonological treatment in a chronic stroke case

P178 rTMS facilitatory priming of the right unlesioned hemisphere maintained and generalized naming improvement induced by phonological treatment in a chronic stroke case

C&amp;EN talks with Noni Byrnes, who leads grant review at the NIH

For many scientists, grant review at the US National Institutes of Health is a black box. But Noni Byrnes, the director of the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review (CSR), wants to shine a light into a process that affects the lives of thousands of scientists every year and sets the direction of health-related research in the US. “When you don’t know what’s going on, you’re much more likely to assume the worst,” Byrnes says from the CSR’s offices in Bethesda, Maryland. “Any attempt we have to make the process transparent, to bring more people into our system, is going to help that.” The CSR is the prime facilitator of peer review at the NIH, with its staff of 500 handling 77% of the agency’s grant applications. The staff manage more than 18,000 reviewers evaluating 62,000 grants from over 200 topical study sections. Byrnes is relatively new to the job—she officially

The representation of plural inflectional affixes in English: evidence from priming in an auditory lexical decision task

ABSTRACTThe representation of inflection is controversial: theories of morphological processing range from those that treat all inflectional morphemes as independently represented in memory to those that deny independent representation for any inflectional morphemes. Whereas identity priming for stems and derivational affixes is regularly reported, priming of inflectional affixes is understudied and has produced no clear consensus. This paper reports results from a continuous auditory lexical decision task investigating priming of plural inflectional affixes in English, in plural prime-target pairs such as crimestrees. Our results show statistically significant priming facilitation for plural primes relative to phonological (cleansetrees) and singular (crimetrees) controls. This finding indicates that inflectional affixes, like lexical stems, exhibit identity priming effects. We discuss implications for morphological theory and point to questions for further work addressing which representation(s) produce the priming effect.

Morphological priming without semantic relationship in Hebrew spoken word recognition

We report on an auditory masked priming study designed to test the contributions of semantics and morphology to spoken word recognition in Hebrew. Thirty-one native Hebrew speakers judged the lexicality of Hebrew words that were primed by words which either share their root morpheme and a transparent semantic relationship with the target (e.g. poreʦ פּורץ ‘burglar’ priming priʦa פּריצה ‘burglary’) or share their root morpheme but lack a transparent semantic relationship with the target (e.g. mifraʦ מפרץ ‘gulf’ priming priʦa פּריצה ‘burglary’). We found facilitatory priming by both types of morphological relatives, supporting that semantic overlap is not required for morphological priming in Hebrew spoken word recognition. Thus, our results extend the findings of Frost, Forster, &amp; Deutsch’s (1997) Experiment 5 to the auditory modality, while avoiding confounds between root priming and Hebrew’s abjad orthography associated with the visual masked priming paradigm. Further, our results are inconsistent with models of word processing which treat morphological priming as reflecting form and semantic coactivation, and instead support an independent role for root morphology in Hebrew lexical processing.

The immediate benefits and long-term consequences of briefly presented masked primes on episodic recollection

Abstract Within-trial priming paradigms have been widely used to measure lexical retrieval and familiarity-based processes in speeded pronunciation, perceptual identification, lexical decision, lexical retrieval, and episodic recognition tasks. Here, we introduce a novel within-trial priming paradigm to examine cued recall, which is considered a more recollection-based task. In each experiment, participants initially studied a list of paired-associates (e.g., BADGE-gold). During each recall test trial, 500 ms after the onset of the stimulus cue (BADGE-??????), a pattern-masked prime was briefly presented for either 48 ms or 125 ms, with the task to recall the word (e.g., gold) paired with the cue (BADGE). Across seven experiments, the primes were identical (gold), semantically related (silver), orthographically related (good), or unrelated (chair) to the to-be-recalled response item (gold). The results consistently indicated that the masked identity primes benefited immediate recall at both the 48 ms and 125 ms durations. There was no benefit from the orthographically related prime condition, suggesting that participants were not using partial letter information as an additional cue for memory retrieval. Semantically related primes only produced a benefit in immediate recall at the 125 ms prime duration. Delayed cued recall performance indicated that the facilitatory priming effects observed in immediate recall were eliminated. In addition, results from conditional analyses suggest that the benefits of retrieval in an immediate recall condition are reversed in the delayed recall condition. We consider multiple interpretations of these delayed recall results and argue that the results are in part due to priming influencing an activation-based mechanism in the immediate recall task, which decreases the retrieval demands for the response item to the paired associate cue, and hence, decreases the long-term benefits of retrieval practice.

The sandwich priming paradigm does not reduce lexical competitor effects.

We investigated the mechanisms underlying sandwich priming, a procedure in which a brief preprime target presentation precedes the conventional mask-prime-target sequence, used to study orthographic similarity. Lupker and Davis (2009) showed the sandwich paradigm enhances orthographic priming effects: With primes moderately related to targets, sandwich priming produced significant facilitation, but conventional priming did not. They argued that unlike conventional priming, sandwich priming is not susceptible to an uncontrolled counteractive inhibitory process, lexical competition, that cancels out moderate facilitation effects. They suggest lexical competition is eliminated by preactivating the target's representation, privileging the target over similar lexical units (competitors). As such, it better measures orthographic relatedness between primes and targets, a key purpose of many priming studies. We tested whether elimination of lexical competition could indeed account for the observed orthographic priming boost with sandwich priming. In three lexical decision experiments and accompanying simulations with a competitive network model, we compared priming effects in three preprime procedures: no preprime (conventional), identity (target) preprime (sandwich), and competitor preprime (included to exacerbate lexical competition). The related prime conditions consisted of replaced-letters, shared neighbor (one-letter-different from both competitor preprime and target), and transposed-all-letter nonword primes. Contrary to the model's predictions, the competitor preprime did not attenuate (Experiment 1) or even reverse the priming effect (Experiment 2). Moreover, the competitor enabled facilitatory priming that was absent with no preprime (Experiment 3). These data suggested that the sandwich orthographic boost could not be attributed to reduced lexical competition but rather to prelexical processes in word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Induced syncyte formation via cytomixis in Trachyspermum ammi (L.) Sprague (Apiaceae)

ABSTRACTCytomixis is a remarkable cytological event which has been presumed to be a prime facilitator of the origin of infraspecific polyploidy. The phenomenon of intercellular chromatin transmigra...

The attribute priming effect in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Experiments with semantic priming (SP) paradigms have documented early hypopriming in patients with AD when concepts are used as primes and attribute concept features as targets, suggesting that concept attributes are vulnerable to damage very early in the disease course. The aims of this study were to confirm early priming reduction in the attribute condition in patients with AD and to determine which of several semantic indexes (such as the level of distinctiveness, correlation or feature dominance of concept features) best predicts the priming effect size in AD. We administered an SP attribute condition paradigm to 20 mildly demented patients with AD and to 10 NCs. We used concept-attribute pairs for which normative data of semantic indexes relative to both concept primes (i.e., number, type, mean level of dominance, distinctiveness and correlation of features constituting the concepts) and target features (i.e., level of feature dominance, correlation and distinctiveness) were available. Results showed that compared to NCs, the AD group obtained very reduced priming facilitation. Furthermore, the item regression analyses showed that the priming decrement in the AD group was predicted by the feature dominance of the target in the related pairs; that is, the lower the target feature dominance, the lower the priming effect elicited. These results confirmed hypopriming in the attribute condition from the very early phase of AD and support the view that attributes which are more salient for the identification of a given concept are also those most resistant to semantic memory degradation in AD pathology.

Cross-language negative priming remains intact, while positive priming disappears: evidence for two sources of selective inhibition

ABSTRACTIn the current experiments, within- and between-language primed lexical decision tasks with Twi-English bilinguals were used. The aim was to explore the priming effects produced by attended and ignored words, in an effort to draw theoretical and empirical parallels and differences between the mechanisms of excitation and inhibition and to isolate the different circumstances in which these mechanisms operate in bilingual language processing. In the within-language (Twi) experiment, facilitatory (positive) priming resulted when a prime word and subsequent probe target word were identical, whereas delayed decisions to probe targets (negative priming) ensued when the ignored prime word was conceptually identical to the subsequent probe target word. In contrast, while the between-language (Twi-English) experiments replicated the ignored repetition negative priming effect, no evidence of positive priming was observed. These between-language findings undermine episodic retrieval models of selective attention that discount inhibitory processes in negative priming paradigms. Instead, our findings substantiate inhibition-based accounts by showing that there are two sources of inhibition operating at the local word and global language levels of abstraction. The findings also support bilingual language representations in which the words of the two languages are integrated.

The Role of Semantic Context in Early Morphological Processing.

There is extensive evidence pointing to an early, automatic segmentation of written words into their constituent units (farm-er, wit-ness); however, less is known about the potential role of contextual information in modulating this analysis. We adapted the standard masked priming paradigm to include an overt semantic prime in order to examine whether semantic context influences morpho-orthographic segmentation of complex words. In particular, we asked how the context will affect processing of semantically opaque forms (witness), where the embedded stem (wit) is incompatible with the meaning of the whole form. Results showed no masked priming facilitation for opaque forms in the presence of a semantic prime, indicating that context can influence early morphological analysis. Priming was found for both semantically transparent and opaque forms (farmer-farm, witness-wit) when there was no semantically-related context, consistent with the literature and an account positing early blind segmentation. These findings provide an important update to the long-standing debate on early morphological processing in written word recognition.