An ERP study of low and high relevance semantic features

Brain Research Bulletin
Giuseppe SartoriLuigi Lombardi

Abstract

It is believed that the N400 elicited by concepts belonging to living is larger than N400 to non-living. This is considered as evidence that concepts are organized, in the brain, on the basis of categories. We conducted a feature-verification experiment where living and non-living concepts were matched for relevance of semantic features. Relevance is a measure of the contribution of semantic features to the "core" meaning of a concept. We found that when relevance is low the N400 is large. In addition, we found that when the two categories of living and non-living are equated for relevance the seemingly category effect at behavioral and neural level disappeared. In sum, N400 is sensitive, rather than to categories, to semantic features, thus showing that previously reported effects of semantic categories may arise as a consequence of the differing relevance of concepts belonging to living and non-living categories.

References

Dec 15, 2000·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·M Kutas, K D Federmeier
Feb 19, 2002·NeuroImage·J T DevlinC J Price
Apr 10, 2004·Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience·Giuseppe Sartori, Luigi Lombardi
Feb 22, 2005·Neuropsychologia·G SartoriL Mattiuzzi
Dec 14, 2005·NeuroImage·Andrea MechelliCathy J Price
Dec 15, 2005·Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior·Keith R Laws

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Citations

Nov 23, 2006·Brain Research Bulletin·Qin ZhangYang Jiang
Sep 28, 2013·Memory & Cognition·Maria MontefineseNicola Mammarella

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