Brain Activation Neuronal Substrates of Nonword Priming Effect: An tMRI Study

摘要

We investigated changes in the behavioral performance and brain activities associated with nonword priming in a Non Word Stem Completion (NWSC) task in Japanese in order to compare the result to our pilot study of word priming. In the behavioral results, we found obvious facilitatory effects in subject’ s performance. Averaged reaction time in nonword priming-condition was 3103ms, while that of nonword nonpriming-condition was 5037ms In the fMRI results, the same tasks were performed by the block-design experimental paradigm without any overt response in MRI scanner. As a result, we found the activations in the bilateral middle and inferior frontal gyrus with right hemispheric prevalence, the superior and inferior parietal gyrus, and the supplementary motor area. These results may suggest that the facilitatory effects observed in WSC-test include implicit memory access and the induced attention after successful retrieval.