Citation

Chen Q, Liang X, Lei Y, Li H. Acta Psychol. 2015; 157: 176-184.

Affiliation

Research Centre for Brain Function and Psychological Science, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China. Electronic address: lihongwrm@vip.sina.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.02.017

PMID

25813899

Abstract

Causally related concepts like "virus" and "epidemic" and general associatively related concepts like "ring" and "emerald" are represented and accessed separately. The Evoked Response Potential (ERP) procedure was used to examine the representations of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory. Participants were required to remember a task cue (causal or associative) presented at the beginning of each trial, and assess whether the relationship between subsequently presented words matched the initial task cue. The ERP data showed that an N400 effect (250-450ms) was more negative for unrelated words than for all related words. Furthermore, the N400 effect elicited by causal relations was more positive than for associative relations in causal cue condition, whereas no significant difference was found in the associative cue condition. The centrally distributed late ERP component (650-750ms) elicited by the causal cue condition was more positive than for the associative cue condition. These results suggested that the processing of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory recruited different degrees of attentional and executive resources.

Language: en