Thus, some recent research has endeavored to reconnect the two literatures by positing that in the context of memory the FN400 is actually a marker of facilitated conceptual processing due to repetition, or “conceptual priming” – and not directly related to feelings of familiarity. On this view, then, the FN400 is an N400, elicited by meaningful stimuli in recognition tasks and modulated in amplitude when prior exposure renders semantic processing easier. To dissociate conceptual priming from familiarity, these studies have measured both in highly similar circumstances in order to identify ERPs that vary with one versus the other. Voss and Paller (2006), for instance, found that priming conceptual information associated with celebrity faces led to FN400 effects that covaried with the magnitude of priming, but, critically, not with familiarity for the same faces. Another line of research used abstract geometric shapes, which vary in their meaningfulness to individual participants and thus in the extent to which they can support conceptual priming with repetition, but which can be made more familiar by repetition, independent of meaningfulness (Voss & Paller 2007). Only
