CNL Lunch

Jeremy Bronheim

An MEG Study of Lexical Decision and the M250

Thursday March 13th, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Behavioral studies of lexical decision tasks have shown that as word frequency increases, reaction time decreases. This implies that the lexical access process is organized in terms of word frequency. Exactly what the process and organization is, however, has been highly contested. Similarly, preliminary MEG studies have shown that in a visual lexical decision task, in addition to an early visual cortex response peak at approximately 170 ms, there is a later response peak at approximately 350 ms that reacts to word frequency. There is also an intermediate peak at approximately 250 ms whose source and underlying process have not yet been identified. This study looks at some of the various models of lexical access and checks their predicted implications for the M250 and M350 peaks against acquired MEG data.