, with a binary decision or not) show neural effects

in temporal brain areas but linguistic tasks involving a binary decision process seem also to involve activation of inferior frontal brain regions (cf., Wright et al. 2011). However, as pointed out before, neural semantic and repetition priming effects have been found in the LIFG using linguistic tasks requiring no binary decision (Chee et al. 2003; Wheatley et al. 2005). So, activation of the LIFG in semantic processing seems not to be restricted to complex semantic retrieval demands like in a semantic decision making task. To date, no study directly compared the neural effects of a semantic task requiring a binary decision with a semantic task that did not. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Current Study In the

present study, we evaluated the impact of a binary semantic decision process on the neuroanatomical localization of neural associative priming effects within a fronto-parieto-temporal network (including the IFG, ITG, STG, MTG, and IPL) that is assumed to support semantic processing at word Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical level (for a review, see Price 2000; Bookheimer 2002; Wu et al. 2009) by contrasting two semantic tasks that differed with respect to a binary semantic decision, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical (i.e., semantic categorization [Experiment 1], and silently thinking about a word’s http://www.selleckchem.com/screening/stem-cell-compound-library.html meaning [Experiment 2]). In both experiments, we used an associative priming paradigm with a short SOA (300 msec) and a low PRP (6.25%) to increase the chance to capture automatic lexical access of semantic representations assumed to be stored in each lexical entry. The focus Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical lay on the functional role of the LIFG in semantic processing. We tested whether the LIFG was specifically activated by semantic tasks involving a binary decision process. For Experiment 1, we expected associative suppression effects in temporal and frontal brain areas with a predominant activation of the LIFG shown to be especially involved during semantic decision making (Demb et al. 1995; Gabrieli et al. 1998; Wagner et al. 2000; Roskies et al. 2001; Wu et al. 2009). For Experiment 2, alternative hypotheses were formulated. If the LIFG was specifically task-related as suggested by Wright et al. (2011), Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical then associative suppression effects should

predominantly be observed in occipito-temporal regions (Petersen et al. 1988; Howard et al. 1992; Moore and Price 1999; Fiebach et al. 2002). However, if the LIFG also takes in charge Adenylyl cyclase lexical-semantic processing irrespective of the nature of the task, then similar results in Experiments 1 and 2 should be expected. Materials and Methods Participants Thirty-six native speakers of German (17 females, 19 males, mean age = 26.45 ± 4.9, age range 21–41 years) recruited from a database available at the Department for Systems Neuroscience (University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany) took part in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. All participants were right-handed according to the Edinburgh Inventory (Oldfield 1971; mean laterality index of 97.1 ± 5.