How do medical students understand disease behaviors? Evidence from event-related potentials

To investigate how medical students process Western medicine (WM) terms vs. traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) terms and how this is impacted by analogical priming from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience.

The experiments were designed as a 2 (TCM terms vs. WM terms) × 2 (correct terms vs. incorrect terms) × 2 (analogical priming task vs. non-priming task) scheme. A total of 26 medical students completed a non-priming judgment task and an analogical priming judgment task on medical terms. During the tasks, the participants were asked to make correct/incorrect judgments on WM terms and TCM terms, and their behavioral data and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded.

Behaviorally, the response speed and accuracy of WM terms were higher than those of TCM terms (both P < .001), indicating a prominent concreteness effect. Analogical priming shortened the response time to medical terms (P < .001), and the response time to TCM terms was shortened more significantly (P = .001). For ERPs, WM terms induced a larger P200 (an early positive ERP component), a smaller N400 (a negative ERP component), and a higher late positive ERP component, indicating superiority of attention adjustment, smaller-scale semantic activation, and a higher cost of late semantic analysis and integration. However, the analogical priming eliminated the difference between WM and TCM terms in P200 and N400 while maintaining it in the LPC. This suggests that WM terms are sensitive to analogical attention adjustment, and TCM terms are susceptible to analogical semantic integration.

Our findings suggest that WM and TCM disease behavior terms may initially differ in concreteness or the use of a verbal-linguistic system. Analogy is more conducive to understanding TCM terms. This research provides important neuroscientific evidence of the difference in thinking between TCM and WM.