Symposium 1.2

EARLY LATENCY EVENT-RELATED READING POTENTIALS: AT THEINTERSECTION OF LEXICAL AND SEMANTIC PROCESSING

Chair: Joseph DienUniversity of Maryland, College Park

A particular strength of event-related potentials (ERPs), compared to other methods ofneuroimaging such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), is its very hightemporal resolution. Making use of this resolution, recent ERP research has been in-creasingly characterizing the time domain of lexical analysis, orthographic and pho-nological. At the same time, the onset of semantic processing has been increasinglypushed back into this very same lexical time domain. The increasing temporal overlapbetween the markers for lexical and semantic processing raise interesting theoreticalquestions about how they interact and to what extent they are processed sequentiallyversus in parallel. The five talks are representative of cutting-edge research on thesefundamental questions of the reading process.

EARLY ORTHOGRAPHIC AND PHONOLOGICAL EFFECTSDURING READING ALOUD IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

Kalinka Timmer & Niels O. SchillerLeiden University

This study confirmed that the Masked Onset Priming Effect (MOPE), which has beenreported before in speakers’ first languages (L1), could also be observed in a secondlanguage (L2). Bilingual Dutch (L1) – English (L2) participants read aloud English wordsstarting with phonologically ambiguous letters (e.g.,/c/; pronounced as/k/in carpet or/s/incigar) or with phonemes that have multiple orthographies (e.g.,/f/; spelled as [ph] in phaseor [f] in fellow) in a masked priming experiment to separate the contribution of ortho-graphic and phonological activation in reading aloud. Event-related brain potentials(ERPs) revealed orthographic priming in early time windows, even if it did not affect theoverall reaction times. Phonological priming, on the other hand, shortened the responsetimes and was weakly indicated in later ERP time windows. Both the orthographic andphonological priming effects were present for words with unambiguous onsets and some-what later for words with ambiguous onsets, where the onset has multiple pronunciationpossibilities. These results show that non-native speakers, even if they speak with an accent(as they are accustomed to a different phonetic system in their L1) and even if they are lessfamiliar to the orthography of their L2, exhibit a similar MOPE as native speakers.

THE EMERGENCE OF ‘‘LEXICAL QUALITY’’ FROM READING

EXPERIENCE: EARLY ERP SIGNATURES OF PARTIAL VS. ROBUSTWORD LEARNING FROM TEXT

Gwen A. Frishkoff1 & Charles A. Perfetti21Georgia State University, 2University of Pittsburgh

We report recent results from a series of ERP studies of word learning from context. Ineach experiment, subjects were exposed to familiar and novel words in multiple contexts(from 1 to 3 sentences), and ERPs were measured before, during, and after exposure.The contexts were either semantically constraining, to promote robust learning, orweakly constraining. By comparing ERPs for words trained in these two conditions, ourgoal was to isolate brain activity that is related to meaning acquisition, as opposed tochanges in familiarity with word form or episodic memory effects. In addition to pre vs.post training outcomes, we examined incremental changes inword knowledge andERPsduring training. Results from three experiments show effects of learning that modulatethe left temporal N300(FT7), medial frontal N350(Fz), left parietal P600(P3) andN400(Pz) effects. The N300 and P600 effects differ for training condition, training task(meaning generation vs. semantic judgment), and delay (immediate vs. delayed post-test). We discuss implications for theories of ‘‘partial’’ semantic knowledge and earlyERP signatures of meaning acquisition.

BEHAVIOURAL AND ERP EVIDENCE FOR EARLY RETRIEVALOF LEXICO-SEMANTIC INFORMATION IN VISUAL WORD

RECOGNITION

Olaf O. HaukMRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit

Timing information from electrophysiological data is increasingly becoming relevant formodels of visual word recognition. It is also important when specific stages of the wordrecognition process are supposed to be compared between participant and patientgroups. Several previous studies have reported early (i.e., o200 ms) effects of lexico-semantic variables on ERP responses; however, these effects are usually weaker than thelate (e.g., N400) responses, and there are still inconsistencies across studies. In a recentstudy, we were attempting to separate stimulus- from response-related ERP effects, and

provide a lower limit for the earliest latencies of lexical and semantic information re-trieval. Subjects performed 3 different types of Go/NoGo tasks: lexical decision (LD),semantic decision (SD), and orthographic decision (OD). Behavioural as well as 64-channel ERP data were recorded. Assignment of stimulus category (e.g., words orpseudowords in LD) to Go or NoGo trials was counterbalanced across subjects. Thisallowed separating response-related and stimulus-related effects. Reaction times around350 ms after word onset already reliably distinguished stimulus categories in LD andSD, and around 300 ms in OD. In the ERP data, a reliable difference between Go andNoGo conditions was observed around 200 ms in all three tasks. Our results demon-strate that brain responses around 200 ms already reflect target detection or responsepreparation. Earliest retrieval of lexical and semantic information must therefore haveoccurred before 200 ms.

ENHANCEDPROCESSINGOFEMOTIONALWORDS, PRE-LEXICAL,

LEXICAL, POST-LEXICAL, OR EXTRA-LEXICAL? IMPLICATIONS

FOR THE ORGANIZATION OF THE MENTAL LEXICON

Johanna KisslerUniversity of Konstanz

Processing of emotional words was shown to differ from that of neutral ones from about200 ms after stimulus presentation. Here, we investigate the functional stage of this en-hanced processing of emotional words in a reading experimentwhere letter strings, pseudowords, and neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant real words controlled for lexical and per-ceptual factors were presented to 24 participants while their event-related brain potentialswere recorded. Differences between letter strings on the one hand and pseudo-words andwords on the other hand were found between 100 and 200 ms after stimulus onset, with apeak at 130 ms, indicating a stage of formal stimulus classification. From about 200 msafter stimulus presentation,words elicitedmore posterior activity than both pseudo-wordsand letter strings, the difference peaking at 230 ms, suggesting a lexicality-driven differ-entiation. Consistent with previous studies, the largest effect of emotional word contentwas seen between 200 and 300 ms, peaking at 285 ms, and supporting a post-lexical locusof the effect. But significant earlier effects of emotion were also identified. Pleasant wordsevoked larger amplitudes than unpleasant and neutral words already at 130ms, coincidingwith the differentiation between words and pseudo-words. This indicates that emotionalwords can some times by-pass sequential lexical analysis, indicating a dynamic influence ofmotivational relevance on reading-related ERPs. This data is complemented by intra-cranial recordings from a pre-surgically implanted patient.

COMBINED ERP/FMRI EVIDENCE FOR LEXICAL EFFECTS IN THE

LANGUAGE FORMULATION AREA

Joseph Dien1, Eric Brian2, Dennis L. Molfese2, & Brian T. Gold31University of Maryland at College Park, 2University of Louisville, 3University

of Kentucky

The Recognition Potential (Rudell, 1991), a left-lateralized negativity that peaks at about200-250 ms, is one of the most interesting of the early latency ERP reading components. Itis the first to consistently display lexicality effects (larger for words vs. non-words) andpossibly semantic effects. It has therefore been suggested to reflect an early confluence oflexical and semantic processing (Martın-Loeches, 2007). The lexicality effect seems to belargely invisible unless the stimuli are temporally flanked by masks at an SOA of about250 ms (Iglesias et al., 2004). It has been suggested that its generator is either the VisualWord Form Area (Martın-Loeches, Hinojosa, Gomez-Jarabo, & Rubia, 2001) or theLanguage Formulation Area (Dien, 2009), a portion of the posterior inferior temporalgyrus (Nielsen, 1946) that has been reported to respond to cloze probability of sentencestimuli (Dien et al., 2008). In this experiment, twenty-three participants underwent the taskwhile having high-density 129-channel ERP data collected and a separate sample of fifteenparticipants underwent the task while having fMRI data collected in a 3T scanner. Ex-amination of the ERP data confirmed that a standard Recognition Potential effect wasproduced. The only corresponding effect in the fMRI data was in the Language Formu-lation Area, confirming it as a more likely source for the Recognition Potential. Based onthe neuroanatomical location and the temporal information, suggestions are made re-garding the nature of the process indexed by the Recognition Potential.

Symposium 1.3

SPR 50TH ANNIVERSARY SYMPOSIUM #1THE PRESENT AS THE PAST’S FUTURE

Chair: Emanuel DonchinUniversity of South Florida

The symposium continues a tradition launched at the 2008 Annual Meeting. We areagain presenting a ‘‘Past Presidents’ Symposium’’ in which four Past Presidents of SPR

2010 SPR Abstracts S3

are invited to reflect on their Presidential Address from the perspective of the present.The specific topics discussed will be presented in the 4 individual abstracts. The par-ticipants this year will be JohnCacioppo,William Iacono,MartaKutas and Peter Lang.The panel will be chaired by Manny Donchin.

SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER

John T. CacioppoUniversity of Chicago

The title of the 1993 Presidential Address was ‘‘Social neuroscience: Autonomic, neu-roendocrine, and immune responses to stress.’’ The thesis of the address was that socialfactors, intrapersonal processes, and autonomic psychophysiology could contribute to afuller understanding of both immune and brain function. The growth of interest andresearch in social neuroscience over the past 17 years has been remarkable, and there isnow considerable evidence that social factors, intrapersonal processes, and autonomicpsychophysiology have contributed to our understanding of immune and brain function.

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL ENDOPHENOTYPES AND

EXTERNALIZING PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

William G. IaconoUniversity of Minnesota

Delivered over a dozen years ago, my presidential address dealt with endophenotypes,including psychophysiological measures putatively tapping genetic risk for substanceuse disorders. Since then, interest in endophenotypes has exploded. In this talk, I willprovide an update on the evolution of the endophenotype concept as well as recentfindings from the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research on endophenotypesfor substance abuse. This work is based on amodel that posits a highly heritable generalliability for behavioral disinhibition, transmitted from parent to child, which accountsfor the covariance among externalizing disorders and traits. Collectively, these char-acteristics emerge over the course of development as childhood disruptive disorders,substance use disorders, antisociality, and other indictors of undercontrolled behavior.This general liability can be indexed as reduced amplitude of the P300 brain potential.Findings supporting the model suggest an approach to genetic research aimed at un-covering the etiology of substance abuse by focusing on the underlying shared liabilityfor externalizing. This approach provides an attractive supplement to ongoing studiesexamining the etiology of each disorder separately.

A DECADE OF ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF

LANGUAGE

Marta KutasUniversity of California, San Diego

ERP studies of language processing have lived up to their promise. ERP investigationsof language processing informed by linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience have in-deed shown that (1) manymore than two areas of the brain are involved, including bothcerebral hemispheres, that (2) similar comprehension processes are engaged acrossdifferent language levels as well as across language and non-language domains, and (3)that individual differences abound, and must ultimately be systematized.

EMOTIONAL NETWORKS IN THE BRAIN: MIXING MEMORY,

DESIRE AND FEAR

Peter LangUniversity of Florida

The view is revisited that emotional memories are associative networks in the brain thatinclude perceptual, semantic, and action (procedural) information. General networkactivation and the instantiation of a memory image may be prompted by external cues(natural or media) that match linked representations in any of these three domains.Psychophysiological and brain imaging data are presented that support this conception.

Presidential Symposium

COMPETING FOR ATTENTION: CORTICAL MECHANISMS OF SELECTION

Chair: Diane BeckUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Selective attention not only enhances task-relevant visual information, but it does so atthe expense of task-irrelevant information. It is widely accepted that this selection is

achieved via modulatory influences of frontoparietal cortex on extrastriate and striatecortex. This symposium explores the interactions among these regions in more depth.Paul Corballis provides ERP evidence that stimuli compete for representation in visualcortex, thus necessitating a top-down biasing mechanism to resolve the competition.Using fMRI, Diane Beck shows that although attention modulates competitive inter-actions in visual cortex, those same interactions also limit attention’s ability to enhancemultiple representations simultaneously. Michael Silver uses functional connectivityanalyses of fMRI data to localize the source of some of the top-down biasing signals totopographical regions in the intraparietal sulcus. Finally, John Serences shows thatattention may adaptively enhance just those visual representations that are most infor-mative to the observer’s current goals.

ERP CORRELATES OF COMPETITION FOR VISUAL

REPRESENTATION

Paul CorballisGeorgia Institute of Technology

There is mounting evidence that whenmultiple objects are present in the visual field theyoften compete for representation in the visual system, so that neural responses to mul-tiple objects are attenuated or delayed until the competition is resolved. The nature anddegree of competition is determined by the visual stimuli and their configuration in spaceas well as by the demands imposed by some behavioral task. I will review recent workusing event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the neural correlates of competition andits resolution.We have focused on the effects of space, task and object identity. Spatiallymediated competition is manifested in a reduction in amplitude of the N2pc componentevoked by a lateralized target object as a decoy object gets closer to the target. The N2pcmay be followed by a second component, Ptc, that appears to reflect a biasing signalrequired to resolve the competition in favor of the target. The effect of competition onthese components varies as a function of task, relative salience of target and decoy, andlocation within the visual field. We have also found evidence for category-specific com-petition manifested in the N1 and N170 components of ERPs evoked by images ofhouses and faces, respectively. The face-specific N170 component is attenuated whenfaces are presented in the context of other faces, but not houses. Likewise, the N1component evoked by houses is attenuated by the presence of other houses but not faces.Taken together these data provide robust evidence for competition at multiple levels ofvisual representation.

INTERACTIONS INVISUALCORTEXLIMIT ATTENTION’S ABILITY

TO ACT ON MULTIPLE ITEMS

Diane BeckUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Limitations in our ability to attend to multiple items is often assumed to stem from aninability to direct attention to multiple locations, and therefore attributed to limitationsin frontoparietal attention mechanisms. We asked whether competitive interactions invisual cortex might also explain attention’s limited capacity to act on multiple items.Directing attention to one of multiple nearby stimuli biases the mutually inhibitoryinteractions among stimuli in favor of the attended item. When attention is dividedamong nearby stimuli, however, biasing the interactions in favor of a single item shouldno longer be possible and instead the attended items should continue to mutually sup-press one another. Using fMRI, we asked whether competitive interactions amongstimuli in visual cortexmay prevent attention fromacting as effectively onmultiple itemsas it does on a single item. We asked participants to direct attention to one or multipleitems that were either likely to or unlikely to interact in visual cortex. We found thatattention was ineffective at enhancing BOLD signal in V4 when it was directed tomultiple stimuli simultaneously, but critically, only when those stimuli were likely tocompete in visual cortex. These data suggest limitations in our ability to attend tomultiple items are not necessarily due to an inability to direct attention tomultiple itemsbut instead reflect an inability to effectively represent multiple attended items.NIH R03 MH082012

FUNCTIONAL NETWORKS UNDERLYING TOP-DOWN VISUAL

SPATIAL ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN

Michael SilverUniversity of California, Berkeley

Spatial attention improves visual perception and increases the amplitude of neural re-sponses in visual cortex. Even in the absence of visual stimulation, directing attention toa particular visual field location increases fMRI responses in portions of early visualcortical areas representing the attended location. Evidence from electrophysiology,neuropsychology, and brain imaging has implicated posterior parietal cortex in thecontrol of visual spatial attention, but the precise functional connections that carry top-down attention signals to visual cortex have not been identified. IPS1 and IPS2 arecortical areas in the human intraparietal sulcus that contain topographic maps of visual

S4 SPR Abstracts 2010