Schedule of Events | Symposia

PRIMED and READy: Prefrontal Cortex Resting-State Activity Modulates Cross-Modal Linguistic Priming Performance.

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Maria Angelina Bekhit¹ (mariaangelina.bekhit@bruins.belmont.edu), Cecilia Garcia², Kerlous Aziz³, Zoe Niesen⁴, Carole Scherling⁵; ¹Neuroscience, Department of Psychological Science and Neuroscience, Belmont University Nashville, TN

The prefrontal cortex (PFC), particularly the left side, plays a crucial role in integrating context and guiding linguistic processes, such as those involved in priming (Hamilton & Hsu, 2023). The current study examined PFC resting-state activity laterality and linguistic priming performance. Thirty right-handed undergraduates (17F, age (SD)= 20.37 (1.273)) completed an eyes-open and -closed resting fNIRS session (8x8 PFC montage), and laterality indices for each channel pair were extracted after data processing [(L-R)/(L+R)]. During a cross-modal linguistic priming task, participants first heard a word and then viewed a word on the screen. Participants judged multiple auditory/visual pairs on word-relatedness, extracting accuracy rates and latency for primed (related) or unprimed (unrelated) pairs. Results expectedly revealed faster latency for primed (vs. unprimed) pairs (rs(28)= 0.650, p< 0.001) but no differences were uncovered regarding accuracy. When examining global left PFC activity for both eyes-open and -closed, no significant relationships were found with both latency and accuracy (p> 0.05). Exploratory analyses targeted the dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) due to its high involvement in verbal performance (Hertrich, 2021) and priming (Fassbender, 2006). Results revealed higher eyes-open activity with lower accuracy for primed-pairs (rs(27)= -0.387, p< 0.05), but no association with latency. Findings suggest that left dlPFC resting preparatory states may influence cross-modal priming task accuracy, with higher activity decreasing active task engagement potential and thereby influencing associated performance. Overall, fNIRS is an assessable tool that can probe resting-state activity and brain lateralization and is highly applicable to examine the neural correlates of executive functioning.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Other