Barnes-Holmes, D., Staunton, C., Barnes-Holmes, Y., Whelan, R., Stewart, I., Commins, S., Walsh, D., Smeets, P., & Dymond, S. (2004). Interfacing Relational Frame Theory with cognitive neuroscience: Semantic priming, The Implicit Association Test, and event related potentials. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 4, 215-240.
The authors, researchers at the National University of Ireland, study the functional relations occurring between environmental events and the physiological activity that takes place inside the brain and central nervous system, with a particular focus on human language and cognition. The research, using both reaction time and neurophysiological measures, supports the argument that there is a clear functional overlap between semantic and derived stimulus relations. Specifically, an evoked potential waveform typically associated with semantic processing (N400) is shown to be sensitive to equivalence versus non-equivalence relations. The results obtained across all five experiments support the view that the study of derived stimulus relations, combined with some of the procedures and measures of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, may provide an important inroad into the experimental analysis of semantic relations in human language.