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Event-related potential responses to letter-string comparison analogies

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Abstract

Previous studies have used analogy completion tasks (e.g., abe is to abf as ijk is to what?) to examine the event-related potential (ERP) parameters of analogical reasoning. In the present study, ERP responses to analogies were investigated using an analogy comparison task (e.g., is abe to abf as ijk is to ijl?), with a focus on structural evaluation. The results showed that the identical match task elicited an N2 component with smaller amplitude than that of the N2 component in the zero- and one-step consistent analogies, reflecting automatic match detection. The data also showed that there were significant differences in the N400 during the consistent and inconsistent analogies, which may reflect a delayed perceptual mismatch with semantic strategies. Moreover, one-step consistent analogies evoked smaller late positive component (LPC) amplitudes than that evoked by identical match or zero-step consistent analogies in the 500- to 800-ms time interval, and one-step inconsistent analogies elicited smaller amplitude LPCs than that elicited by zero-step inconsistent analogies in the 500- to 750-ms time interval, which suggested that LPCs reflected structure evaluation in analogy comparison tasks.

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Acknowledgments

The study was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31200780 and 31300866) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (SWU1309002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality of Ministry of Education, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400700, China

    Changquan Long, Jing Li, Antao Chen & Jiang Qiu

  2. Key Laboratory for Cognition and Human Behavior of Hunan Province, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, 410081, China

    Jie Chen

  3. Research Center for Brain Function and Psychological Science, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China

    Hong Li

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  1. Changquan Long
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  2. Jing Li
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  3. Antao Chen
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  4. Jiang Qiu
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  5. Jie Chen
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  6. Hong Li
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Correspondence to Jie Chen.

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Long, C., Li, J., Chen, A. et al. Event-related potential responses to letter-string comparison analogies. Exp Brain Res 233, 1563–1573 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4230-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4230-z

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