ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition2012
Temporal dynamics of activation of thematic and functional knowledge during conceptual processing of manipulable artifacts.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Taxonomic and thematic semantic systems.Psychological bulletin · 2017Pooled it
- Thematic knowledge survives visual crowding and influences object identification.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Prediction efficiency and incremental processing strategy during spoken language comprehension in autistic children: an eye-tracking study.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- High-level construal mindset promotes categorizing information based on thematic associate relations.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Tracking the time-course of spoken word recognition of Cantonese Chinese in sentence context: Evidence from eye movements.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Agent-Object Relationships in Level-2 Visual Perspective Taking: An Eye-Tracking Study.Journal of cognition · 2024Article
- Tool use acquisition induces a multifunctional interference effect during object processing: evidence from the sensorimotor mu rhythm.Experimental brain research · 2023Article
- Slower Peak Pupillary Response to Emotional Faces in Parents of Autistic Individuals.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- From letters to composed concepts: A magnetoencephalography study of reading.Human brain mapping · 2021Article
- Asymmetric Underlying Mechanisms of Relation-Based and Property-Based Noun-Noun Conceptual Combination.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Left inferior parietal and posterior temporal cortices mediate the effect of action observation on semantic processing of objects: evidence from rTMS.Psychological research · 2020Article
- Inductive Reasoning Differs Between Taxonomic and Thematic Contexts: Electrophysiological Evidence.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Co-activation of Taxonomic and Thematic Relations in Spoken Word Comprehension: Evidence From Eye Movements.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Doctor, Teacher, and Stethoscope: Neural Representation of Different Types of Semantic Relations.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2018Article
- The cost of switching between taxonomic and thematic semantics.Memory & cognition · 2018Article
- Semantic control deficits impair understanding of thematic relationships more than object identity.Neuropsychologia · 2017Article
- Effects of motion speed in action representations.Brain and language · 2017Article
- Learning, remembering, and predicting how to use tools: Distributed neurocognitive mechanisms: Comment on Osiurak and Badets (2016).Psychological review · 2017Article
- Comparing the temporal dynamics of thematic and taxonomic processing using event-related potentials.PloS one · 2017Article
- Chained Activation of the Motor System during Language Understanding.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The current research aimed at specifying the activation time course of different types of semantic information during object conceptual processing and the effect of context on this time course. We distinguished between thematic and functional knowledge and the specificity of functional similarity. Two experiments were conducted with healthy older adults using eye tracking in a word-to-picture matching task. The time course of gaze fixations was used to assess activation of distractor objects during the identification of manipulable artifact targets (e.g., broom). Distractors were (a) thematically related (e.g., dustpan), (b) related by a specific function (e.g., vacuum cleaner), or (c) related by a general function (e.g., sponge). Growth curve analyses were used to assess competition effects when target words were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and embedded in contextual sentences of different generality levels (Experiment 2). In the absence of context, there was earlier and shorter lasting activation of thematically related as compared to functionally related objects. The time course difference was more pronounced for general functions than specific functions. When contexts were provided, functional similarities that were congruent with context generality level increased in salience with earlier activation of those objects. Context had little impact on thematic activation time course. These data demonstrate that processing a single manipulable artifact concept implicitly activates thematic and functional knowledge with different time courses and that context speeds activation of context-congruent functional similarity.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.