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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on February 24, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp007
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Influence of Multiple Primes on Bottom-Up and Top-Down Regulation during Meaning Retrieval: Evidence for 2 Distinct Neural Networks

Carin Whitney1, Murray Grossman2 and Tilo T. J. Kircher3

1 Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK, 2 Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA, 3 Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg 35032, Germany

Address correspondence to email: c.whitney{at}psych.york.ac.uk.

Meaning retrieval of a word can proceed fast and effortlessly or can be characterized by a controlled search for candidate lexical items and a subsequent selection process. In the current study, we facilitated meaning retrieval by increasing the number of words that were related to the final target word in a triplet (e.g., lion–stripes–tiger). To induce higher search and selection demands, we presented ambiguous words as targets (i.e., homonyms like ball) in half of the trials. Hereby, the dominant (game), low-frequent (dance), or both meanings of the homonym were primed. Participants performed a relatedness judgment during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Activation in a bilateral network (angular gyrus, rostromedial prefrontal cortex) increased linearly with multiple related primes, whereas the posterior left inferior prefrontal cortex (pLIPC) showed the reverse activation pattern for unambiguous trials. When homonyms served as targets, pLIPC responded strongest when both meanings or low-frequent concepts were addressed. Additional anterior left inferior prefrontal cortex activation was observed for the latter trials only. The data support an interaction between 2 distinct cerebral networks that can be linked to automatic bottom-up support and top-down control during meaning retrieval. They further imply a functional specialization of the LIPC along an anterior–posterior dimension.

Key Words: angular gyrus • fMRI • inferior frontal cortex • selection • semantic priming


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