Poster C87, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 10:45 am – 12:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
To go or not to go? Or just go? An ERP-based analysis of two-choice vs. go/no-go response procedures in lexical decision
Marta Vergara-Martinez1, Pablo Gomez2, Manuel Perea1,3;1Universitat de València, 2DePaul University, Chicago, 3Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language (BCBL)
In cognitive neuroscience studies of language processing, two response procedures have indistinctly been used: go/no-go (GNG) and two-choice (2C). In the GNG procedure, participants are instructed to respond to a category of stimuli (e.g., words in a word/nonword discrimination task [i.e., lexical decision]) and to refrain from responding to the other category (e.g., nonwords). In the 2C procedure, participants are instructed to respond not only to the stimuli from one category, but also to the stimuli from the other category (e.g., right-hand response for words and left-hand response for nonwords in lexical decision). Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the GNG procedure yields a greater sensitivity to experimental manipulations. A number of lexical decision experiments have shown greater orthographic, lexical, and semantic effects in the GNG than in the 2C version of the lexical decision task (Perea, Abu Mallouh, & Carreiras, 2014; Hino & Lupker, 1998, 2000). Furthermore, a larger sensitivity of the GNG over the 2C procedure has also been reported in other behavioral tasks (e.g., target detection in a scene: Bacon-Macé, Kirchner, Fabre-Thorpe, & Thorpe, 2007; same-different matching task: Grice & Reed, 1992; semantic categorization: Siakaluk, Buchanan, & Westbury, 2003). The apparent gains in the detectability of a number of phenomena with the GNG procedure in behavioral experiments do suggest that response demands in the GNG and 2C procedures may affect core components of processing rather than merely ancillary processes such as response selection or motor response execution. To uncover the time course of information processing in the GNG vs. the 2C procedures during visual word recognition, we examined the impact of a lexical factor (word frequency) in a lexical decision task by tracking ERP (Event-Related Potential) waves. In this set-up, the word-frequency effect was used as a marker for the activation of lexical properties. If the differences across response procedures influence relatively early lexical processing stages, we would expect word-frequency to induce differences across tasks in the early epochs of the ERPs. Alternatively, if the differences across response procedures only occur at a post-access response selection stage, we would only expect differences across procedures in late time windows of the ERPs. Results showed that the word-frequency effect occurred earlier in time (starting around 200 ms post-stimuli) in the GNG than in the 2C response procedure. These results support the view of a largely interactive cognitive network in which a subtle manipulation of the response procedure can affect early components of processing.
Themes: Reading, Methods
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)