Article

Cerebellar Theta-Burst Stimulation Selectively Enhances Lexical Associative Priming

Details

Citation

Argyropoulos GP (2011) Cerebellar Theta-Burst Stimulation Selectively Enhances Lexical Associative Priming. Cerebellum, 10 (3), pp. 540-550. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-011-0269-y

Abstract
Recent research in cerebellar cognitive and linguistic functions makes plausible the idea that the cerebellum is involved in processing temporally contiguous linguistic input. In order to assess this hypothesis, a simple lexical decision task was constructed to study whether the effect of transcranial magnetic stimulation on two different cerebellar sites would have a selective impact on associative as opposed to semantic priming. This is the first experiment applying transcranial magnetic stimulation of the cerebellum to a linguistic task. The results show a selective drop in lexical decision accuracy after stimulation of a medial cerebellar site in the first session of participation. Most importantly, they also demonstrate a selective increase of associative priming sizes after stimulation of the same site that cannot be attributed to changes in sensorimotor performance or in accuracy rates. The finding is discussed within the context of domain-general associative cerebellar computations.

Keywords
Prediction; Language processing; Associative priming; TMS

Journal
Cerebellum: Volume 10, Issue 3

StatusPublished
Publication date30/09/2011
Publication date online31/03/2011
Date accepted by journal31/03/2011
URLhttp://hdl.handle.net/1893/33300
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC
ISSN1473-4222
eISSN1473-4230

People (1)

Dr Georgios Argyropoulos

Dr Georgios Argyropoulos

Lecturer in Psychology, Psychology