Publications 2000
Eimer, M. (2000). An ERP study of sustained spatial attention to stimulus eccentricity. Biological Psychology, 52, 205-220.
Eimer, M. (2000). Attentional modulations of event-related brain potentials sensitive to faces. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 17, 103-116.
Eimer, M. (2000). Effects of face inversion on the structural encoding and recognition of faces: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Cognitive Brain Research, 10, 145-158.
Eimer, M. (2000). Event-related brain potentials distinguish processing stages involved in face perception and recognition. Clinical Neurophysiology, 111, 694-705.
Eimer, M. (2000). The face-specific N170 component reflects late stages in the structural encoding of faces. NeuroReport, 11, 2319-2324.
Eimer, M. (2000). The time course of spatial orienting elicited by central and peripheral cues: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Biological Psychology, 53, 253-258.
Eimer, M., & Driver, J. (2000). An event-related brain potential study of cross-modal links in spatial attention between vision and touch. Psychophysiology, 37, 697-705.
Schlaghecken, F., & Eimer, M. (2000). A central/peripheral asymmetry in subliminal priming. Perception & Psychophysics, 62, 1367-1382.
Abstract: Masked primes presented prior to a target result in behavioural benefits on incompatible trials (where prime and target are mapped onto opposite responses) when they appear at fixation, but in behavioural benefits on compatible trials (where prime and target are mapped onto the same response) when appearing peripherally. Experiment 1 investigated the time course of this central-peripheral asymmetry (CPA). For central primes, compatible-trial benefits at short SOAs turned into incompatible-trial benefits at longer SOAs. For peripheral primes, compatible-trial benefits at short SOAs increased in size with longer SOAs. Experiment 2 showed that these effects also occur when primes and targets are physically dissimilar, ruling out an interpretation in terms of perceptual properties of the stimulus material. Experiments 3 and 4 investigated whether the CPA is related to visual-spatial attention and/or to retinal eccentricity per se. Results indicate that the CPA is independent of attentional factors, but strongly related to the physiological inhomogenity of the retina. It is argued that central and peripheral primes trigger an initial motor activation, which is inhibited only if primes are presented at retinal locations of sufficiently high perceptual sensitivity. Results are discussed in terms of an activation threshold model.
Schlaghecken, F., Stuermer, B., & Eimer, M. (2000). Chunking processes in the learning of event sequences. Memory & Cognition, 28, 821-831.
Abstract: It was investigated whether effects of implicit learning (IL) are due to well learned and explicitly represented fragments of the stimulus material (‘chunks’). To this purpose, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during an oddball-version of a serial RT task: At unpredictable positions within a 16-item letter sequence, single deviant items replaced an item of the repeatedly presented standard sequence. After acquisition, the ‘process dissociation procedure’ (Jacoby, 1991) was adopted to identify explicitly learned sequence parts for each participant. Acquisition of sequence knowledge was reflected in faster RTs for standard as compared to deviant items, and in enhanced N2b and P3b components for deviant items. While the ERP effects were obtained for explicitly represented sequence parts only, RT effects were independent of subsequent reproduction performance. These results indicated that (i) ERPs are a valid measure of explicit knowledge; (ii) implicit and explicit knowledge co-exist in serial RT-tasks; and (iii) chunking processes play a major role in the acquisition of explicit knowledge about event sequences.
