Acknowledgments We would like to thank K. L. Sainani for support in the statistical analysis. This study was supported by NINDS P30 center core grant (NS069375-01A1), grants from Mathers Foundation and the Burnett Family Fund (to R.W. Tsien), NIA (U01 AG032225), the Jean Perkins Foundation, and the Horngren Family Alzheimer’s Research Fund to FML.
In picture-word interference (PWI) paradigms, pictures of simple objects are presented along Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical with lexical distractors, and the participants are instructed to name the pictures.

Dependent on their linguistic relation to the picture, distractors may speed up (facilitation) or slow down (inhibition) naming responses (see Fig. 1). Response times (RTs) in PWI paradigms have shown to be speeded up by associatively related and phonologically Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical related distractor words (e.g., target picture dog, distractor bone and fog, respectively) when compared to unrelated words (e.g., roof), and they have been reported to be slowed down by categorically related words (e.g., cat) (e.g., Glaser and Düngelhoff 1984; Schriefers et al. 1990; Damian and Martin 1999; Alario et al. 2000; Starreveld 2000; Jescheniak and Schriefers 2001; Abdel Rahman and Melinger 2007; Mahon et al. 2007). In the few Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies on PWI, hemodynamic changes corresponding to the behavioral interference

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical effects involved brain regions related to language processing as well as conflict processing comprising conflict/competition

monitoring and cognitive control. However, the brain mechanisms underlying facilitation and Apitolisib ic50 inhibition in interference paradigms remain equivocal (see Fig. 1). The specific impact of facilitatory distractors on language-related brain activations was either a signal increase (Mechelli et al. 2007; Abel et al. 2009a) or a signal decrease (De Zubicaray et al. 2002; De Zubicaray and McMahon 2009). Likewise, the inhibitory distractors induced either increased language-related brain activations Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical (Abel et al. 2009a) or decreased ones (De Zubicaray and McMahon 2009). Furthermore, increased activation in brain for regions related to monitoring/control processes has been reported for facilitation (De Zubicaray et al. 2002) and inhibition (De Zubicaray et al. 2001; Abel et al. 2009a; but cf. De Zubicaray and McMahon 2009). An increase or decrease of activation was primarily determined relative to distractors without a relation to the target picture, other target-related distractors, or a lower control condition. Figure 1 Clarification of terms used in the present lexical interference study. The relation between behavioral interference effects, neural interference effects, and underlying cognitive mechanisms is unresolved, as indicated by question marks.