N400 event-related brain potential evidence for semantic priming deficits in persons at clinical high risk for psychosis

The N400 electroencephalographic event-related potential (ERP) waveform normally occurs in response to any meaningful stimulus, such as a word or picture, and is smaller (less negative) for stimuli that are more related to preceding ones (Kutas and Federmeier, 2011). For example, after seeing the prime word cat, people exhibit smaller N400  s to the related word mouse than the unrelated word arrow. These “N400 semantic priming effects” are thought to occur because meaningful prime stimuli activate the neural representations of their concepts in semantic memory, our store of knowledge about the world, and this activation then ext ends to related concepts, making their corresponding stimuli easier to process, as reflected in smaller N400s (Kutas and Federmeier, 2011).
Source: Schizophrenia Research - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Letter to the Editor Source Type: research