Electrophysiological signature of the interplay between habits and inhibition in response to smoking-related cues in individuals with a smoking habit: An event-related potential study.

The rigid, stimulus-bound nature of drug seeking that characterizes substance use disorder (SUD) has been related to a dysregulation of motivational and early attentional reflexive and inhibitory reflective systems. However, the mechanisms by which these systems are engaged by drug-paired conditioned stimuli (CSs) when they promote the enactment of seeking habits in individuals with a SUD have not been elucidated. The present study aimed behaviourally and electrophysiologically to characterize the nature of the interaction between the reflexive and reflective systems recruited by CSs in individuals with a smoking habit. We measured the behavioural performance and associated event-related potentials (ERPs) of 20 individuals with a smoking habit and 20 controls, who never smoked regularly, in a modified Go/NoGo task during which smoking-related CSs, appetitive and neutral pictures, presented either in first or third-person visual perspective were displayed 250 ms before the Go/NoGo cue. We show that smoking-related cues selectively influence early incentive motivation-related attention bias (N2 after picture onset), motor readiness and behavioural inhibition (Go-P3, NoGo-P3 and Pc) of individuals with a smoking habit only when presented from a first-person visual perspective. These data together identify the neural signature of the aberrant engagement of the reflexive and reflective systems during the recruitment of an incentive habit by CSs presented as if they had been response-produced, that is, as conditioned reinforcers.

Are eye movements and EEG on the same page?: A coregistration study on parafoveal preview and lexical frequency.

Readers extract visual and linguistic information not only from fixated words but also upcoming parafoveal words to introduce new input efficiently into the language processing pipeline. The lexical frequency of upcoming words and similarity with subsequent foveal information both influence the amount of time people spend once they fixate the word foveally. However, it is unclear from eye movements alone the extent to which parafoveal word processing, and the integration of that word with foveally obtained information, continues after saccade plans have been initiated. To investigate the underlying neural processes involved in word recognition after saccade planning, we coregistered electroencephalogram (EEG) and eye movements during a gaze-contingent display change paradigm. We orthogonally manipulated the frequency of the parafoveal and foveal words and measured fixation related potentials (FRPs) upon foveal fixation. Eye movements showed primarily an effect of preview frequency, suggesting that saccade planning is based on the familiarity of the parafoveal input. FRPs, on the other hand, demonstrated a disruption in downstream processing when parafoveal and foveal input differed, but only when the parafoveal word was high frequency. These findings demonstrate that lexical processing continues after the eyes have moved away from a word and that eye movements and FRPs provide distinct but complementary accounts about oculomotor behavior and neural processing that cannot be obtained from either method in isolation. Furthermore, these findings put constraints on models of reading by suggesting that lexical processes that occur before an eye movement program is initiated are qualitatively different from those that occur afterward. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic parafoveal processing in natural reading: Insight from fixation-related potentials & eye movements.

Prior research suggests that we may access the meaning of parafoveal words during reading. We explored how semantic-plausibility parafoveal processing takes place in natural reading through the co-registration of eye movements (EM) and fixation-related potentials (FRPs), using the boundary paradigm. We replicated previous evidence of semantic parafoveal processing from highly controlled reading situations, extending their findings to more ecologically valid reading scenarios. Additionally, and exploring the time-course of plausibility preview effects, we found distinct but complementary evidence from EM and FRPs measures. FRPs measures, showing a different trend than EM evidence, revealed that plausibility preview effects may be long-lasting. We highlight the importance of a co-registration set-up in ecologically valid scenarios to disentangle the mechanisms related to semantic-plausibility parafoveal processing.

Exploring the temporal dynamics of speech production with EEG and group ICA.

Speech production is a complex skill whose neural implementation relies on a large number of different regions in the brain. How neural activity in these different regions varies as a function of time during the production of speech remains poorly understood. Previous MEG studies on this topic have concluded that activity proceeds from posterior to anterior regions of the brain in a sequential manner. Here we tested this claim using the EEG technique. Specifically, participants performed a picture naming task while their naming latencies and scalp potentials were recorded. We performed group temporal Independent Component Analysis (group tICA) to obtain temporally independent component timecourses and their corresponding topographic maps. We identified fifteen components whose estimated neural sources were located in various areas of the brain. The trial-by-trial component timecourses were predictive of the naming latency, implying their involvement in the task. Crucially, we computed the degree of concurrent activity of each component timecourse to test whether activity was sequential or parallel. Our results revealed that these fifteen distinct neural sources exhibit largely concurrent activity during speech production. These results suggest that speech production relies on neural activity that takes place in parallel networks of distributed neural sources.

Are Sensory-Motor Relationships Encoded ad hoc or by Default?: An ERP Study.

In this event-related potentials study we tested whether sensory-motor relations between concrete words are encoded by default or only under explicit ad hoc instructions. In Exp. 1, participants were explicitly asked to encode sensory-motor relations (e.g., "do the following objects fit in a pencil-cup?"), while other possible semantic relations remained implicit. In Exp. 2, using the same materials other group of participants were explicitly asked to encode semantic relations (e.g., "are the following objects related to a pencil-cup?"), and the possible sensory-motor relations remained implicit. The N400 component was sensitive to semantic relations (e.g., "desk" related to "pencil-cup") both under implicit (Exp. 1) and explicit instructions (Exp. 2). By contrast, most sensory-motor relations (e.g., "pea" fitting in "pencil-cup") were encoded ad hoc under explicit instructions (Exp. 1). Interestingly some sensory-motor relations were also encoded implicitly, but only when they corresponded to "functional" actions associated with high-related objects (e.g., "eraser" fitting in "pencil-cup") and occurring at a late time window (500-650 ms; Exp. 2), suggesting that this type of sensory-motor relations were encoding by default.

Making sense of social interaction: Emotional coherence drives semantic integration as assessed by event-related potentials.

We compared event-related potentials during sentence reading, using impression formation equations of a model of affective coherence, to investigate the role of affective content processing during meaning making. The model of Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise, 1979, 2007) predicts and quantifies the degree to which social interactions deflect from prevailing social norms and values - based on the affective meanings of involved concepts. We tested whether this model can predict the amplitude of brain waves traditionally associated with semantic processing. To this end, we visually presented sentences describing basic subject-verb-object social interactions and measured event-related potentials for final words of sentences from three different conditions of affective deflection (low, medium, high) as computed by a variant of the ACT model (Schröder, 2011). Sentence stimuli were closely controlled across conditions for alternate semantic dimensions such as contextual constraints, cloze probabilities, co-occurrences of subject-object and verb-object relations. Personality characteristics (schizotypy, Big Five) were assessed to account for individual differences, assumed to influence emotion-language interactions in information processing. Affective deflection provoked increased negativity of ERP waves during the P2/N2 and N400 components. Our data suggest that affective incoherence is perceived as conflicting information interfering with early semantic processing and that increased respective processing demands - in particular in the case of medium violations of social norms - linger on until the N400 time window classically associated with the integration of concepts into embedding context. We conclude from these results that affective meanings influence basic stages of meaning making.

Does the ending matter? The role of gender-to-ending consistency in sentence reading.

In many languages, during language comprehension the cognitive system needs to recover grammatical gender features in order to identify agreement dependencies established between different sentence constituents. A two-route model proposes that gender can be retrieved either lexically or computing its correlations with the word-form. However, evidence supporting this model has been collected thus far only with metalinguistic tasks on isolated nouns or word pairs. The present ERP study was aimed at testing whether the system is sensitive to gender formal cues within a sentence context. Specifically, we investigated the time course of gender processing in sentence reading where the target nouns could show a reliable gender-related ending (i.e., transparent nouns) or an ambiguous ending (i.e., opaque nouns). The results showed a greater central-anterior negativity for transparent nouns than for opaque nouns between 200 ms and 500 ms, suggesting that the system can rapidly detect reliable formal cues to gender. In addition, gender agreement violations showed a LAN-P600 pattern that was not modulated by the gender-to-ending consistency. Taken together, these results confirm that also during sentence comprehension, distributional gender cues conveyed by noun endings can be detected. This finding is compatible with the existence of a form-based route. The formal cues to gender are detected at an early stage, this probably being part of the word recognition process. Whereas this distributional information does not seem to be crucial in computing agreement dependencies within a sentence context.

Tracking the Time Course of Competition During Word Production: Evidence for a Post-Retrieval Mechanism of Conflict Resolution.

Producing a word is often complicated by the fact that there are other words that share meaning with the intended word. The competition between words that arises in such a situation is a well-known phenomenon in the word production literature. An ongoing debate in a number of research domains has concerned the question of how competition between words is resolved. Here, we contributed to the debate by presenting evidence that indicates that resolving competition during word production involves a postretrieval mechanism of conflict resolution. Specifically, we tracked the time course of competition during word production using electroencephalography. In the experiment, participants named pictures in contexts that varied in the strength of competition. The electrophysiological data show that competition is associated with a late, frontally distributed component that arises between 500 and 750 ms after picture presentation. These data are interpreted in terms of a model of word production that relies on a mechanism of cognitive control.

Two sides of gender: ERP evidence for the presence of two routes during gender agreement processing.

The present ERP study aimed at providing evidence for the existence of two routes in the brain for the processing of morphosyntactic features during language comprehension; a lexical route which retrieves grammatical properties stored in the lexicon without reliance on formal cues, and a form-based route that takes advantage of sub-lexical units strongly related to a specific grammatical class. In the experiment, we investigated grammatical gender agreement processing in Spanish article-noun word pairs using a grammaticality judgment task. Article-noun pairs either agreed or did not agree in gender. Noun transparency was manipulated such that the ending could be strongly associated with a specific gender class (i.e., transparent nouns) or not (i.e., opaque nouns). A visual half-field method was employed and ERPs were recorded in response to the target nouns in order to disentangle the initial hemisphere-specific computations of gender processing. ERP results showed that, while both hemispheres compute agreement dependencies, the left hemisphere is sensitive to the presence of formal gender cues at an early stage (i.e., 350-500 ms) indicating the presence of a form-based route. The right hemisphere showed an ERP effect of transparency, but later than the left hemisphere (i.e., 500-750 ms). These findings confirm the presence of two routes to gender, which can be differently used depending on the availability of transparent endings. In addition, the results showed hemispheric differences in the time course of the form-based route.

Left fronto-temporal dynamics during agreement processing: evidence for feature-specific computations.

Grammatical agreement is a widespread language phenomenon that indicates formal syntactic relations between words; however, it also conveys basic lexical (e.g. grammatical gender) or semantic (e.g. numerosity) information about a discourse referent. In this study, we focus on the reading of Spanish noun phrases, violating either number or gender determiner-noun agreement compared to grammatical controls. Magnetoencephalographic activity time-locked to the onset of the noun in both types of violation revealed a left-lateralized brain network involving anterior temporal regions (~220 ms) and, later in time, ventro-lateral prefrontal regions (>300 ms). These activations coexist with dependency-specific effects: in an initial step (~170 ms), occipito-temporal regions are employed for fine-grained analysis of the number marking (in Spanish, presence or absence of the suffix '-s'), while anterior temporal regions show increased activation for gender mismatches compared to grammatical controls. The semantic relevance of number agreement dependencies was mainly reflected by left superior temporal increased activity around 340 ms. These findings offer a detailed perspective on the multi-level analyses involved in the initial computation of agreement dependencies, and theoretically support a derivational approach to agreement computation.

Concreteness in word processing: ERP and behavioral effects in a lexical decision task.

Relative to abstract words, concrete words typically elicit faster response times and larger N400 and N700 event-related potential (ERP) brain responses. These effects have been interpreted as reflecting the denser links to associated semantic information of concrete words and their recruitment of visual imagery processes. Here, we examined whether there are ERP differences between concrete and abstract stimuli controlled for a large number of factors including context availability (i.e., richness of semantic associations) and imageability. We found that abstract words elicited faster behavioral responses but that concrete words still elicited larger N400 and N700 responses. We propose that once all other factors, including imageability and context availability are controlled, abstract words may trigger a larger number of superficial linguistic associations that can be quickly used for response decisions. The ERP differences, however, would index the greater semantic processing (integration of multimodal information) for concrete than abstract words during meaning activation.

An electrophysiological analysis of contextual and temporal constraints on parafoveal word processing.

During natural reading, parafoveal information is processed to some degree. Although isolated words can be fully processed in the parafovea, not all sentence reading experiments have found evidence of semantic processing in the parafovea. We suggest a possible reconciliation for these mixed results via two ERP studies in which volunteers read sentences presented word by word at fixation, flanked bilaterally by the next word to its right and the previous word to its left. Half the words in the right parafovea of critical triads and in the fovea for the subsequent triad were semantically incongruent. The conditions under which parafoveal words elicit canonical visual N400 congruity effects suggest that they are processed in parallel with foveal words, but that the extraction of semantic information parafoveally is a function of contextual constraint and presentation rate, most likely under high contextual constraint and at slower rates.

Phrase frequency effects in language production.

A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., 'car', 'red'), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., 'red car') are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information at grain-sizes beyond individual words.

Electrophysiological signatures of masked transposition priming in a same-different task: evidence with strings of letters vs. pseudoletters.

Research on masked transposed-letter priming (i.e., jugde-JUDGE triggers a faster response than jupte-JUDGE) has become a key phenomenon to reveal how the brain encodes letter position. Recent behavioural evidence suggests that the mechanism responsible for position coding in a masked priming procedure works with familiar "object" identities (e.g., letters, digits, symbols) but not with unfamiliar object identities (e.g., pseudoletters). Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the time course of masked transposition priming of letters vs. pseudoletters in a cue-target same-different matching task. Target stimuli were preceded by a masked prime that could be: (i) identical to the target; (ii) identical to the target except for the transposition of two internal letters/pseudoletters; or (iii) identical to the target except for the substitution of two internal letters/pseudoletters. Only cue-target 'same' trials were analyzed. The priming manipulation affected the "same" trials of the letter strings between 250 ms and 450 ms: identity and transposition conditions produced less negative amplitudes than the substitution condition. Because of the onset latency of this priming effect, we suggest that masked primes affected mainly the cognitive processes related to the categorization of the trials (match versus mismatch), rather than to the initial stages of orthographic processing.

Objects, events and "to be" verbs in Spanish--an ERP study of the syntax-semantics interface.

In Spanish, objects and events at subject position constrain the selection of different forms of the auxiliary verb "to be": locative predicates about objects require "estar en", while those relating to events require "ser en", both translatable as "to be in". Subjective ratings showed that while the "object+ser+en" is considered as incorrect, the "event+estar+en" combination is also perceived as unacceptable but to a lesser degree. In an ERP study, we evaluated the impact of a purely semantic distinction (object versus events) on the subsequent processing of these auxiliary verbs followed by locatives in Spanish. For the "ser en" predicate, the P600 component was larger when the subject was an object than when it was an event. This P600 effect is consistent with an online repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. On the other hand, for the "estar en" predicate, event subjects when compared to object subjects showed more positive ongoing amplitudes between 280 and 380 ms after the presentation of the "en" preposition, followed by a longer positive wave starting around 400 ms and lasting until 700 ms after the presentation of the following determiner, with central and frontal scalp distributions respectively. Thus, the different subject-predicate combinations, depending on the semantic features of the subjects, triggered syntactic reparatory processes at a structural level. These findings are consistent with an incremental interpretation of sentence meaning based on the interaction between syntactic and semantic information.

Electrophysiological effects of semantic context in picture and word naming.

Recent language production studies have started to use electrophysiological measures to investigate the time course of word selection processes. An important contribution with respect to this issue comes from studies that have relied on an effect of semantic context in the semantic blocking task. Here we used this task to further establish the empirical pattern associated with the effect of semantic context, and whether the effect arises during output processing. Electrophysiological and reaction time measures were co-registered while participants overtly named picture and word stimuli in the semantic blocking task. The results revealed inhibitory reaction time effects of semantic context for both words and pictures, and a corresponding electrophysiological effect that could not be interpreted in terms of output processes. These data suggest that the electrophysiological effect of semantic context in the semantic blocking task does not reflect output processes, and therefore undermine an interpretation of this effect in terms of word selection.

Grammatical agreement processing in reading: ERP findings and future directions.

In the domain of written sentence comprehension, the computation of agreement dependencies is generally considered as a form-driven processing routine whose domain is syntactic in nature. In the present review we discuss the main findings emerging in the Event-Related Potential (ERP) literature on sentence comprehension, focusing on the different dimensions of agreement patterns (features, values, constituents involved and language): Agreement mismatches usually evoke a biphasic electrophysiological pattern (Left Anterior Negativity - LAN, 300-450 msec and P600 after 500 msec). This ERP pattern is assumed to reflect rule-based computations sensitive to formal (inflectional) covariations of related words (trigger-target). Here we claim that agreement processing is sensitive to both the type of feature involved and the constituents that express the agreement dependency. More specifically, LAN could reflect violation of expectancy (elicited by the trigger) for the target functional morphology; later, trigger and target are structurally integrated at the sentence level (early P600). However, morphosyntactic information could trigger the activation of higher-level representations that are not strictly syntactic in nature. The recruitment of this additional non-syntactic information (mirrored by N400-like effects) indicates that rule-based computations of agreement dependencies are not blind to non-syntactic information but are often recruited to establish sentence-level relations.

Parafoveal perception during sentence reading? An ERP paradigm using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) with flankers.

We describe a new procedure using event-related brain potentials to investigate parafoveal word processing during sentence reading. Sentences were presented word by word at fixation, flanked 2° bilaterally by letter strings. Flanker strings were pseudowords, except for the third word in each sentence, which was flanked by either two pseudowords or a pseudoword and a word, one on each side. Flanker words were either semantically congruent or incongruent with the sentence context. P2 (175-375 ms) amplitudes were less positive for contextually incongruent than congruent flanker words but only with flanker words in the right visual field for English and in the left visual field in Hebrew. Flankered word presentation thus may be a suitable method for the electrophysiological study of parafoveal perception during sentence reading.

Electrophysiological correlates of language switching in second language learners.

This study analyzed the electrophysiological correlates of language switching in second language learners. Participants were native Spanish speakers classified in two groups according to English proficiency (high and low). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while they read English sentences, half of which contained an adjective in Spanish in the middle of the sentence. The ERP results show the time-course of language switch processing for both groups: an initial detection of the switch driven by language-specific orthography (left-occipital N250) followed by costs at the level of the lexico-semantic system (N400), and finally a late updating or reanalysis process (LPC). In the high proficiency group, effects in the N400 time window extended to left anterior electrodes and were followed by larger LPC amplitudes at posterior sites. These differences suggest that proficiency modulates the different processes triggered by language switches.