ABSTRACT
The original version of this article contained an error in the co-author name and e-mail address. The author name should read as "Chen-Hao Tan" instead of "Cheng-Hao Tang".
ABSTRACT
As N270 has been widely shown to be sensitive to nonsocial information conflict, the present study investigated whether social information conflict can elicit increased N270 in either explicit or implicit processing conditions. Gender stereotype-related picture-word pairs and picture-word pairs in specific colors were used as social and nonsocial information, respectively. Participants performed an explicit task based on the S1-S2 paradigm in Study 1, and both social and nonsocial information conditions elicited larger N270 than the no-conflict condition. In Study 2, participants performed a word judgment task that was modified from the S1-S2 paradigm of Study 1. However, neither social information nor nonsocial information elicited larger N270 within the conflict condition. Social trials generally elicited a more negative ERP waveform than nonsocial trials overall. These findings suggest that N270 may reflect the processing of social information conflict only in explicit conditions and also that the cognitive basis of N270 is thus a general but explicit processing of working memory representation conflict.
Subject(s)
Conflict, Psychological , Evoked Potentials/physiology , Language , Memory, Short-Term/physiology , Reaction Time/physiology , Social Perception , Stereotyping , Visual Perception/physiology , Adult , Electroencephalography , Facial Recognition/physiology , Female , Humans , Male , Reading , Young AdultABSTRACT
It is an open question whether social stereotype activation can be distinguished from nonsocial semantic activation. To address this question, gender stereotype activation (GSA) and lexical semantic activation (LSA) were directly compared. EEGs were recorded in 20 participants as they identified the congruence between prime-target word pairs under four different conditions (stereotype congruent, stereotype incongruent, semantic congruent, and semantic incongruent). We found that congruent targets elicited faster and more accurate responses and reduced N400 amplitudes irrespective of priming category types. The N400 congruency effect (i.e., the difference between incongruity and congruity) started earlier and had greater amplitude for GSA than for LSA. Moreover, gender category priming induced a smaller N400 and a larger P600 than lexical category priming. These findings suggest that the brain is not only sensitive to both stereotype and semantic violation in the post-perceptual processing stage but can also differentiate these two information processes. Further, the findings suggest superior processing (i.e., faster and deeper processing) when the words are associated with social category and convey stereotype knowledge.
Subject(s)
Brain/physiology , Evoked Potentials/physiology , Gender Identity , Stereotyping , Adult , Electroencephalography , Female , Humans , Male , Reaction Time/physiology , Young AdultABSTRACT
In this study, a priming Stroop paradigm was used to determine whether stereotype activation is unintentional. Priming conditions (priming/no-priming) and the relationship between priming and target (consistent/inconsistent/no-relation) were the independent variables; accuracy, reaction time and N400 amplitude were used as dependent variables. The reaction time revealed that stereotype activation is, to some extent, unintentional. Furthermore, the event-related potenial (ERP) results showed that N400 amplitude was larger for inconsistent conditions than for consistent conditions. This result supported the notion that stereotype activation is an unintentional and automatic process.
