Although several cognitive processes, including speech processing, have been studied during sleep, working memory (WM) has never been explored up to now. Our study assessed the capacity of WM by testing speech perception when the level of background noise and the sentential semantic length (SSL) (amount of semantic information required to perceive the incongruence of a sentence) were modulated....

The aim of this study is to examine the neural substrates involved in semantic priming using a combined event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERP) study. Twelve subjects were instructed to judge whether the presented target word was a real word or a nonword. Under the related condition, target words were preceded by a semantically related prime...

The electrophysiological response to words during the 'N400' time window (approximately 300-500 ms post-onset) is affected by the context in which the word is presented, but whether this effect reflects the impact of context on access of the stored lexical information itself or, alternatively, post-access integration processes is still an open question with substantive theoretical consequences....

Recent research has shown that a new face paradigm is superior to the conventional "flash only" approach that has dominated P300 brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for over 20 years. However, these face paradigms did not study the repetition effects and the stability of evoked event related potentials (ERPs), which would decrease the performance of P300 BCI. In this paper, we explored whether a n...

Recent theories of semantic memory suggest a subdivision into several separate domains of knowledge. The present study examined the structure of semantic person knowledge by analyzing both behavioral and ERP correlates of associative priming (via co-occurrence and/or shared semantic information) versus purely categorical priming (via shared occupational information). Participants performed fami...

Research on people’s arithmetic knowledge (e.g., 2 + 5 = 7) suggests that it is organized and accessed in a way analogous to other forms of conceptual knowledge (e.g., tulips and daisies are flowers). Evidence for this claim comes in part from research that recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and found that incorrect arithmetic facts evoke a response that is analogous to the “N400” r...

Recent evidence suggests that affect acts as modulator of cognitive processes and in particular that induced mood has an effect on the way semantic memory is used on-line. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine affective modulation of semantic information processing under three different moods: neutral, positive and negative. Fifteen subjects read 324 pairs of sentences, after mood ...

The present study aimed to explore the variations of semantic processing according to the number of target words (i.e., 4, 12 and 24) and according to the number of repetitions (i.e, 1 to 15). The number of targets had no impact on the N400 brain potential, the index of semantic processing, nor on the late positive component (LPC), an index of episodic encoding and retrieval. Analyses of the ef...

Humans are unique among all species in their ability to develop and enforce social norms, but there is wide variation in the strength of social norms across human societies. Despite this fundamental aspect of human nature, there has been surprisingly little research on how social norm violations are detected at the neurobiological level. Building on the emerging field of cultural neuroscience, ...

To clarify how different the processing of verbal information is from the processing of meaningful non-verbal information, the present study characterized the developmental changes in neural responses to words and environmental sounds from pre-adolescence (7-9 years) through adolescence (12-14 years) to adulthood (18-25 years). Children and adults' behavioral and electrophysiological responses ...