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Description: In conversation, interlocutors often use the semantics of the comprehended message to inform the semantics of the planned message. How do interlocutors integrate these two messages? We used rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) and EEG to probe the attentional distribution between spoken distractor words and target pictures in the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm. We presented participants with auditory distractor nouns (auditory (f1); tagged at 54Hz) together with categorically related or unrelated target pictures (visual (f2); tagged at 68Hz) that had to be named after a delay. RIFT elicits steady state evoked potentials, which reflect attentional allocation to the tagged stimuli. When two tagged stimuli interact with each other, integration effects have been observed at the intermodulation frequency of the two base frequencies (e.(Brodeur et al., 2014)g., f2-f1; Drijvers et al., 2021). Our results showed clear power increases at 54Hz and 68Hz during the tagging window, but no differences between related or unrelated conditions. More interestingly, we observed a larger power difference in the unrelated compared to the related condition at the intermodulation frequency (68Hz – 54Hz: 14Hz), indicating stronger integration of the auditory and visual stimuli when they are unrelated. Our results go beyond standard PWI results (e.g., Bürki et al., 2020) by showing that participants do not have more difficulty visually attending to the related pictures or inhibiting the related auditory distractors. Instead, processing difficulties arise when the two stimuli interact, meaning that participants might be trying to prevent integration of the auditory and visual stimuli in the related condition.
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