Ausbildung kortikaler Repräsentationen, die der langfristigen perzeptuellen Bahnung (Priming) zugrunde liegen: Die Rolle von Verarbeitungseffizienz, Aufmerksamkeit, neuronaler Selektivität und Markmalsverlust

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Alan Richardson-Klavehn, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Clinical Neurology; Neurosurgery and Neuroradiology
• Term: from 2008 to 2011
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 44294592

Priming is an important, sometimes nonconscious, long-term memory function, by which exposure to a stimulus improves the future cognitive processing of that stimulus. Visual perceptual priming is accompanied by decreased neural responses in the ventral visual stream on repetition (retrieval) that have been hypothesized to reflect (1) increased neural processing efficiency, or (2) sharpened neural responding, or (3) loss of neural feature coding. Counterintuitively, priming has now also been linked with neural response decreases in the ventral visual stream on initial exposure (encoding), suggesting (4) that different neural mechanisms may underlie priming-related neural response decreases at encoding and at retrieval, and (5) that top-down attentional factors at encoding may play an important role in the neural basis of priming. Four experiments are proposed that investigate these five hypotheses regarding the neural basis of priming, by explicitly manipulating cognitive processing efficiency, attention, and perceptual feature match between study and test stimuli, using multi-modal measurements of brain activity (fMRI, MEG, EEG) at both encoding and retrieval.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Hans-Jochen Heinze