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Review
. 2023 Apr 11;62(1):44-63.
doi: 10.5334/pb.1184. eCollection 2023.

Resisting Visual, Phonological, and Semantic Interference - Same or Different Processes? A Focused Mini-Review

Coline Grégoire  1 , Steve Majerus  1   2
Affiliations
Review

Resisting Visual, Phonological, and Semantic Interference - Same or Different Processes? A Focused Mini-Review

Coline Grégoire et al. Psychol Belg. .

Abstract

The unitary nature of resistance to interference (RI) processes remains a strongly debated question: are they central cognitive processes or are they specific to the stimulus domains on which they operate? This focused mini-review examines behavioral, neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence for and against domain-general RI processes, by distinguishing visual, verbal phonological and verbal semantic domains. Behavioral studies highlighted overall low associations between RI capacity across domains. Neuropsychological studies mainly report dissociations for RI abilities between the three domains. Neuroimaging studies highlight a left vs. right hemisphere distinction for verbal vs. visual RI, with furthermore distinct neural processes supporting phonological versus semantic RI in the left inferior frontal gyrus. While overall results appear to support the hypothesis of domain-specific RI processes, we discuss a number of methodological caveats that ask for caution in the interpretation of existing studies.

Keywords: domain-general; domain-specific; inferior frontal gyrus; interference; resistance to interference.

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Conflict of interest statement

The second author is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. He was not involved in the review, nor in the decision process of this paper. The first author has no competing interest to declare.

Figures

Activity peaks for verbal vs visual RI, and phonological vs semantic RI displayed on brain renders
Figure 1
Summary of the activity peaks observed in the left and right frontal lobes for between-domain contrasts of RI. Notes: This figure was built by extracting first the MNI coordinates associated with contrasts between verbal semantic, verbal phonological and/or visual RI from the studies reported in this review. The selected MNI coordinates were then assembled using the WFU Pick Atlas (Maldjian et al., 2003, 2004) for each domain and displayed with a sphere shape of 5mm radius. These WFU-generated masks were then overlaid on a 3D render MRI template using MRICroGL (http://www.nitrc.org).
Number of Articles Returned at Every Step of the Research Strategy
Number of Articles Returned at Every Step of the Research Strategy. Notes: also available on https://osf.io/wbk8f/.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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