There has been much debate over whether music can convey extra-musical meaning. The experiments presented here investigated whether low level musical features, specifically the timbre of a sound, have a direct access route to meaningful representations. Short musical sounds with varying timbres were investigated with regard to their ability to elicit meaningful associations, and the neural mech...

'Winner-take-all' networks are an important theoretical construct in visual neuroscience. An implication of winner-take-all networks is that a stimulus that wins the competition for selection receives maximal activation and will be consciously perceived, even when selection was incorrect. In this study, competition was induced between physically presented ('real') and self-constructed ('illusor...

The nature of audio-visual interactions is poorly understood for meaningful objects. These interactions would be indirect through semantic memory according to the amodal nature of knowledge, whereas these interactions would be direct according to the modal nature of knowledge. This question, central for both memory and multisensory frameworks, was assessed using a cross-modal priming paradigm f...

That similar words can prime one another isn’t news. However, recently this phenomenon has been exploited to make inferences about conceptual representations. What types of similarity matter? While there is evidence that similarity in function, shape, and even manipulation figure in the organization of semantic memory, evidence for color similarity is sparse. This is surprising: intuition sugge...

Prime pictures of emotional scenes appeared in parafoveal vision, followed by probe pictures either congruent or incongruent in affective valence. Participants responded whether the probe was pleasant or unpleasant (or whether it portrayed people or animals). Shorter latencies for congruent than for incongruent prime-probe pairs revealed affective priming. This occurred even when visual attenti...

Priming of semantic classifications may occur because of response-related priming or because of priming at a more central locus. To separate these two possibilities, we randomly intermixed adjectives and first names, using a response window procedure. Participants decided whether the adjectives were positively or negatively valenced and whether the names were male or female. Each of these kinds...

Consciousness’ role in high-level semantic integration is still unclear. Here, we presented masked pairs of images, which could be unrelated (e.g., a broken plate and an eagle), associatively related (e.g., a broken plate and a fork) or abstractly related (e.g., a broken plate and a fighting couple). Low-level features of the pairs were controlled for. In each trial, a masked pair (prime) was f...

This study explored the organization of the semantic field and the conceptual structure of moving experiences by investigating German-language expressions referring to the emotional state of being moved. We used present and past participles of eight psychological verbs as primes in a free word-association task, as these grammatical forms place their conceptual focus on the eliciting situation a...

Two experiments combined masked priming with event-related potential (ERP) recordings to examine effects of primes that are orthographic neighbors of target words. Experiment 1 compared effects of repetition primes with effects of primes that were high-frequency orthographic neighbors of low-frequency targets (e.g., faute-faune [error-wildlife]), and Experiment 2 compared the same word neighbor...

In this paper we classify fuzzy subgroups of the dihedral group $D_{pqrs}$  for distinct primes  $p$, $q$, $r$ and $s$. This follows similar work we have done on distinct fuzzy subgroups of some dihedral groups.We present formulae for the number of (i) distinct maximal chains of subgroups, (ii) distinct fuzzy subgroups and (iii) non-isomorphic classes of fuzzy subgroups under our chosen equival...