Even though comparisons to the unrelated distractor should yield distractor-unspecific brain responses (hypotheses A and B), enhanced/suppressed brain regions may overlap for distractor types that share common characteristics-–constituting our hypothesis C (see Fig. 2). This is much more probable for suppression than for enhancement, because brain activations for related distractors barely exceeded the one for the effortful unrelated distractors, and the related distractors were highly specific (see Abel et #see more keyword# al. 2009a). Three combinations

of distractor types can be considered: Both phonologically and associatively related distractors speed picture naming responses; thus, overlapping brain regions especially sensitive to facilitation may be

observable when combining both distractor types. Both phonologically and categorically related distractors entail features of the target picture, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical either parts of its sounds/phonemes or of its semantic attributes; there may be overlapping brain regions related to lexical features. And both associatively and categorically related distractors contain semantic relationships to the target, either regarding conceptual-semantic associations or Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical lexical-semantic neighborhoods; there may be overlapping brain areas for semantics in general. To resume, our previous paper (Abel et al. 2009a) focused on the enhancements given in the comparisons between target-related distractors in order to separate language-processing stages. In contrast, the present work aims at a better understanding what enhanced and suppressed brain responses—featured by comparisons

to unrelated distractors—represent, especially if these enhancements/suppressions are Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical distractor unspecific and if suppression mirrors the results previously found in priming (instead of revealing deactivated language areas specific for a certain distractor type). This required reexaminations as well Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical as secondary data analyses on the comparison of target-related distractor types to unrelated distractors in our lexical interference fMRI-paradigm. We presume (1) to find suppression at least in some brain areas predescribed for neural priming including conflict processing. This should occur for facilitatory interference, and to a lower extent also for inhibitory interference of categorical distractors due to 17-DMAG (Alvespimycin) HCl their potential role as a prime. (2) Enhanced brain activations found at a less conservative threshold (uncorrected for multiple comparisons, P < 0.001) in language-related areas should be distractor unspecific, and (3) enhanced/suppressed brain regions (uncorrected) may overlap for linguistic distractor types (i.e., for distractors with (i) facilitatory effects (phonologically and associatively related), (ii) feature overlap (phonologically and categorically related), or (iii) semantic relationships (associatively and categorically related)).