fMRI Reveals Right-Hemisphere Semantic Activation During Verbal Problem Solving

Beeman, Mark; Stebbins, Glenn T.; Carrillo, Marı́a C.; Karni, Orit; Glover, Gary H.; Desmond, John E.

doi:10.1037/e501882009-166

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Both Weisbrod et al 64 and Pizzagalli et al 26 interpreted their findings as evidence for a specialization of the right hemisphere for the appreciation of specifically remote associations, a specialization which is in fact suggested by a growing body of data from behavioral (see reference 65 for overview), electrophysiological 66 and neuroimaging experiments. 67,68 The present study has two major limitations. First, we examined a relatively small number of subjects, and second, we did not investigate patients with thought disorders.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Very similar conclusions were drawn by Pizzagalli et al who administered a lateralized semantic priming task to an independent sample of healthy subjects who were either strong believers or strong skeptics in paranormal phenomena; 26 this paper reported stronger indirect (but not direct) semantic priming in believers than skeptics, an effect which was confined, however, to left visual field/right hemisphere stimulations. Both Weisbrod et al 64 and Pizzagalli et al 26 interpreted their findings as evidence for a specialization of the right hemisphere for the appreciation of specifically remote associations, a specialization which is in fact suggested by a growing body of data from behavioral (see reference 65 for overview), electrophysiological 66 and neuroimaging experiments 67,68 …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Associative processing and paranormal belief

Gianotti

Möhr

Pizzagalli

et al. 2001

Psychiatry Clin Neurosci

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In the present study we introduce a novel task for the quantitative assessment of both originality and speed of individual associations. This 'BAG' (Bridge-the-Associative-Gap) task was used to investigate the relationships between creativity and paranormal belief. Twelve strong 'believers' and 12 strong 'skeptics' in paranormal phenomena were selected from a large student population (n > 350). Subjects were asked to produce single-word associations to word pairs. In 40 trials the two stimulus words were semantically indirectly related and in 40 other trials the words were semantically unrelated. Separately for these two stimulus types, response commonalities and association latencies were calculated. The main finding was that for unrelated stimuli, believers produced associations that were more original (had a lower frequency of occurrence in the group as a whole) than those of the skeptics. For the interpretation of the result we propose a model of association behavior that captures both 'positive' psychological aspects (i.e., verbal creativity) and 'negative' aspects (susceptibility to unfounded inferences), and outline its relevance for psychiatry. This model suggests that believers adopt a looser response criterion than skeptics when confronted with 'semantic noise'. Such a signal detection view of the presence/absence of judgments for loose semantic relations may help to elucidate the commonalities between creative thinking, paranormal belief and delusional ideation.

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