Pulling out the stimulus letters NICHOLAS THOMPSON: The classic piece on Paul Ryan, the stimulus, and his district.
Consistent with Lüders et al.'s stimulation results, Nobre et al. observed evoked potentials to both verbal and nonverbal visual stimuli (letter strings, written words, and faces) in the ventral temporal areas.
Within each panel of Figure 3 (top row), time courses of oscillatory power are seen to be quite similar across the three verbal stimuli (letter, word, object denoted by red symbols) but dissimilar from both the spatial (green) and grating (blue) stimuli.
Thus, there was a double dissociation between inversion effects for biological motion and faces, with no inversion effect for our non-biological stimuli (letters, houses).
All 10 stimuli (letters or numbers) were presented simultaneously in each trial.
We manipulated the interfering effect of a distractor by presenting no irrelevant stimuli (no-distractor), non-semantic irrelevant stimuli (letter-distractor), and semantic irrelevant stimuli (word-distractor).
We used 2 experimental types in our investigation: single stimulus report with central presentation (Experiment 1) and whole report with peripheral presentation (Experiment 2), both with 2 types of stimuli: letters and digits.
In other words, we expect a larger numerical advantage for tasks without necessary involvement of semantic processing and/or compared to non-semantic linguistic stimuli (letters), since in these cases the automatically activated numerical semantics could be most supportive.
They found that socially anxious participants were impaired in their ability to generate mental imagery for neutral stimuli (letters of the alphabet) as compared to non-socially anxious participants.
