Cortical and subcortical signatures of conscious object recognition

The neural mechanisms underlying conscious recognition remain unclear, particularly the roles played by the prefrontal cortex, deactivated brain areas and subcortical regions. We investigated neural activity during conscious object recognition using 7 Tesla fMRI while human participants viewed object images presented at liminal contrasts. Here, we show both recognized and unrecognized images recruit widely distributed cortical and subcortical regions; however, recognized images elicit enhanced activation of visual, frontoparietal, and subcortical networks and stronger deactivation of the default-mode network. For recognized images, object category information can be decoded from all of the involved cortical networks but not from subcortical regions. Phase-scrambled images trigger strong involvement of inferior frontal junction, anterior cingulate cortex and default-mode network, implicating these regions in inferential processing under increased uncertainty. Our results indicate that content-specific activity in both activated and deactivated cortical networks and non-content-specific subcortical activity support conscious recognition.

A starring role for inference in the neurocognition of visual narratives

Research in verbal and visual narratives has often emphasized backward-looking inferences, where absent information is subsequently inferred. However, comics use conventions like star-shaped “action stars” where a reader knows events are undepicted at that moment, rather than omitted entirely. We contrasted the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to visual narratives depicting an explicit event, an action star, or a “noise” panel of scrambled lines. Both action stars and noise panels evoked large N400s compared to explicit-events (300–500 ms), but action stars and noise panels then differed in their later effects (500–900 ms). Action stars elicited sustained negativities and P600s, which could indicate further interpretive processes and integration of meaning into a mental model, while noise panels evoked late frontal positivities possibly indexing that they were improbable narrative units. Nevertheless, panels following action stars and noise panels both evoked late sustained negativities, implying further inferential processing. Inference in visual narratives thus uses cascading mechanisms resembling those in language processing that differ based on the inferential techniques.

Effects of age on memory for pragmatic implications in advertising

People employ automatic inferential processing when confronting pragmatically implied claims in advertising. However, whether comprehension and memorization of pragmatic implications differ between young and older adults is unclear. In the present study, we used eye-tracking technology to investigate online cognitive processes during reading of misleading advertisements. We found an interaction between age and advertising content, manifested as our older participants generated higher misleading rates in health-related than in health-irrelevant products, whereas this content-bias did not appear in their younger counterparts. Eye movement data further showed that the older adults spent more time processing critical claims for the health-related products than for the health-irrelevant products. Moreover, the correlations between fixation duration on pragmatic implications and misleading rates showed opposite trends in the two groups. The eye-tracking evidence novelly suggests that young and older adults may adopt different information processing strategies to comprehend pragmatic implications in advertising: More reading possibly enhances young adults’ gist memory whereas it facilitates older adults’ verbatim memory instead.

Das inferências à interpretação recursiva na leitura do texto literário em L2

When it comes to L2 reading, literary texts are often seen as barriers which are difficult to overcome even in higher proficiency levels, since they do not rely solely on a certain level of language performance. This text questions the influence that inferential processing (Kintsch 1998; Koda 2004) has on deep comprehension (Bernhardt 1991: 2011) and on the distance that this genre demands from its reader (Armstrong 2013; Olson 1994). Advantages of literary reading are pointed out in what concerns a L2 learning process, insofar as they leave a mark on the reader’s mental flexibility, as s/he is forced to escape cognitive routines, and led into feeding a future cognitive reservoir (Armstrong 2013; Paradis 2004; Pinto 2010; 2013).

Response-Strategy in the Pre-Solution Period Affects Learning of Auditory Signal Detection

Signal detection as a theoretical framework has been a boon to psychological science, uniting many effects in mathematically tractable theories. Few studies, however, have considered acquisition within a signal-detection framework. The periods of acquisition and the dynamics of signal detection parameters (discriminability and criterion) are unclear, thus obscuring both the pliability and the evolution of these periods and parameters. We addressed this gap by training mice with differential prior experience in an auditory signal detection task. Briefly, naïve mice (Naïve), mice given separate experience with each of the later correct choice options (Correct Choice Response Transfer, CCRT), and mice experienced in conditional discriminations but not auditory signal detection (Conditional Discrimination Transfer, CDT) were trained to detect the presence or absence of a tone in white-noise. We found that a two-period (pre-solution and solution; see Heinemann, 1983) model of acquisition described the data well and that the pre-solution period was characterized not by several response strategies, but by a selective sampling of biased response strategies until adoption of a conditional responding strategy as mice transitioned into the solution period. Signal detection parameters reflected these dynamics: discriminability remained low until adoption of the conditional responding strategy indicating discriminability is sensitive to feedback and thus acquired; criterion took excursions reflecting selective sampling but not sensitivity to feedback. Prior experience affected the length and composition of the pre-solution period. CCRT and CDT mice had shorter pre-solution periods than naïve mice, CDT and Naïve mice developed substantial criterion biases and acquired asymptotic discriminability faster than CCRT mice. We discuss these data in terms of implications for signal detection and learning theories, proposing a modification of learning theories in which inferential processing during the pre-solution period may facilitate acquisition.

Poetic effects and visuospatial form: a relevance-theoretic perspective

Sperber and Wilson (1995:222) posit the term poetic effect for the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures. Crucially, the input to pragmatic processing, which prompts the derivation of a poetic effect, is achieved via some stylistically pronounced linguistic feature: for example, a repeated lexical item, a peculiar syntactic form, a piece of alliteration, and so on. However, what has never been considered to any great depth from a relevancetheoretic perspective is how unusual elements of visuospatial form might also impact upon the reader’s basic understanding and wider interpretation of a given poetic text in ways that result in the derivation of specialised poetic effects. Therefore, the thesis posits a relevance-theoretic account of the cognitive-pragmatic effects of short linelength and line divisions, when employed and interpreted within complex forms of poetry. The account is split into two hypotheses relating to short line-length and line divisions respectively. Hypothesis 1 states that the use of short line-length leads to the majority of the text’s lexical material being perceived in a much slower, and therefore intense fashion, which consequently causes the lexical and encyclopaedic entries that such material links to within the mind to remain active for relatively longer periods of time. During such extended periods of lexical and encyclopaedic activation, literary readers are encouraged to inferentially process the text’s explicit-propositional content in relation to a range of further items of encyclopaedic-contextual material, which can give rise to arrays of additional contextual effects of a weakly implicit and therefore poetic nature. Hypothesis 2 states that line divisions are often intentionally utilised in poetic texts by writers in order to visuospatially separate integral syntactic units upon the page. This can encourage readers to pause and briefly consider, upon an anticipatoryhypothetical basis, the various possible pragmatic extensions of the text’s momentarily incomplete logical and propositional status, pre-line division as it were. The various pragmatic extensions may be formulated as arrays of weak explicatures, which for some readers may achieve poetic effects (in the specialised relevance-theoretic sense of the term). The process effectively constitutes the visuospatial equivalent of a deliberate ‘pause for effect’, which triggers a considerable degree of further inferential processing, and provides a distinct communicational ‘reward’ primarily at an explicit-propositional level.