A Theoretical Framework for a Hybrid View of the N400

In this study, we present a novel theoretical account of the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component. Hybrid views interpret this ERP component in terms of two cognitive operations: (i) access of information, which is related to predictions (predictability component), and (ii) integration of information, which is related to plausibility (plausibility component). Though there is an empirical evidence for this view, what has been left open so far is how these two operations can be defined. In our approach, both components are related to categorization. The critical word and the argument position it is related to are associated with categories that have a graded structure. This graded structure is defined in terms of weights both on attributes and values of features belonging to a category. The weights, in turn, are defined using probability distributions. The predictability component is defined in terms of the information gain with respect to non mismatched features between the two categories. The plausibility component is defined as the difference in the degree of typicality between the two categories. Finally, the N400 amplitude is defined as a function of both components.

Addison as Critic and Critical Theorist

In the first half of the twentieth century Addison’s literary-critical and theoretical works were understood as early formulations of a literary aesthetics, as important theoretical statements on wit and imagination, as pioneering exercises in the analysis and sponsorship of vernacular literary texts, as influential popularizations of philosophical ideas. These writings have in recent decades, however, been less regularly a subject of attention. Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s Addison’s essays in literary criticism and theory were often treated as though they were covert works of political ideology, as affirmations of ‘a hierarchic Chain of Seeing’. This essay takes Addison at his literary-critical word. It stresses the epistemological, rather than the sensational, elements in Addison’s critical theorizing. In particular, it argues that Addison the critic was fundamentally concerned with recognizably Aristotelian pleasures of mimesis. As readers we take a double mimetic pleasure, not only from our recognition of literature’s imitations of the natural world but also from our recognition of the contextual particulars—political, historical, literary, discursive—which inform writings of earlier times.

Cambridge Psycholinguistic Inventory of Christian Beliefs: A registered report of construct validity, internal consistency and test–retest reliability

While religious beliefs are typically studied using questionnaires, there are no standardized tools available for cognitive psychology and neuroscience studies of religious cognition. Here we present the first such tool—the Cambridge Psycholinguistic Inventory of Christian Beliefs (CPICB)—which consists of audio-recorded items of religious beliefs as well as items of three control conditions: moral beliefs, abstract scientific knowledge and empirical everyday life knowledge. The CPICB is designed in such a way that the ultimate meaning of each sentence is revealed only by its final critical word, which enables the precise measurement of reaction times and/or latencies of neurophysiological responses. Each statement comes in a pair of Agree/Disagree versions of critical words, which allows for experimental contrasting between belief and disbelief conditions. Psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic matching between Agree/Disagree versions of sentences, as well as across different categories of the CPICB items (Religious, Moral, Scientific, Everyday), enables rigorous control of low-level psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic features while testing higher-level beliefs. In the exploratory Study 1 (N = 20), we developed and tested a preliminary version of the CPICB that had 480 items. After selecting 400 items that yielded the most consistent responses, we carried out a confirmatory test–retest Study 2 (N = 40). Preregistered data analyses confirmed excellent construct validity, internal consistency and test–retest reliability of the CPICB religious belief statements. We conclude that the CPICB is suitable for studying Christian beliefs in an experimental setting involving behavioural and neuroimaging paradigms, and provide Open Access to the inventory items, fostering further development of the experimental research of religiosity.

A Rose by Any Other Verb: The Effect of Expectations and Word Category on Processing Effort in Situated Sentence Comprehension

Recent work has shown that linguistic and visual contexts jointly modulate linguistic expectancy and, thus, the processing effort for a (more or less) expected critical word. According to these findings, uncertainty about the upcoming referent in a visually-situated sentence can be reduced by exploiting the selectional restrictions of a preceding word (e.g., a verb or an adjective), which then reduces processing effort on the critical word (e.g., a referential noun). Interestingly, however, no such modulation was observed in these studies on the expectation-generating word itself. The goal of the current study is to investigate whether the reduction of uncertainty (i.e., the generation of expectations) simply does not modulate processing effort-or whether the particular subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure used in these studies (which emphasizes the referential nature of the noun as direct pointer to visually co-present objects) accounts for the observed pattern. To test these questions, the current design reverses the functional roles of nouns and verbs by using sentence constructions in which the noun reduces uncertainty about upcoming verbs, and the verb provides the disambiguating and reference-resolving piece of information. Experiment 1 (a Visual World Paradigm study) and Experiment 2 (a Grammaticality Maze study) both replicate the effect found in previous work (i.e., the effect of visually-situated context on the word which uniquely identifies the referent), albeit on the verb in the current study. Results on the noun, where uncertainty is reduced and expectations are generated in the current design, were mixed and were most likely influenced by design decisions specific to each experiment. These results show that processing of the reference-resolving word—whether it be a noun or a verb—reliably benefits from the prior linguistic and visual information that lead to the generation of concrete expectations.

Autistic Adults are Not Impaired at Maintaining or Switching Between Counterfactual and Factual Worlds: An ERP Study

We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment that tests whether autistic adults are able to maintain and switch between counterfactual and factual worlds. Participants (N = 48) read scenarios that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, then either maintained the counterfactual world or switched back to the factual world. When the context maintained the world, participants showed appropriate detection of the inconsistent critical word. In contrast, when participants had to switch from a counterfactual to factual world, they initially experienced interference from the counterfactual context, then favoured the factual interpretation of events. None of these effects were modulated by group, despite group-level impairments in Theory of Mind and cognitive flexibility among the autistic adults. These results demonstrate that autistic adults can appropriately use complex contextual cues to maintain and/or update mental representations of counterfactual and factual events.

Cambridge Psycholinguistic Inventory of Christian Beliefs: A Registered Report of Construct Validity, Internal Consistency and Test-Retest Reliability

While religious beliefs are typically studied using paper-based or online questionnaires and surveys, there are no standardized tools available for experimental studies of religious cognition. Here we present the first such tool - the Cambridge Psycholinguistic Inventory of Christian Beliefs (CPICB) - which consists of audio-recorded items of religious beliefs as well as items of three control conditions: moral beliefs, abstract scientific knowledge, and empirical everyday life knowledge. The CPICB is designed in such a way that the ultimate meaning of each sentence is revealed only by its final critical word, which enables precise measurement of reaction times and/or latencies of neurophysiological responses. Each statement comes in a pair of Agree/Disagree versions of critical words, which allows experimental contrasting between belief and disbelief conditions. Psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic matching between Agree/Disagree versions of sentences as well as across different categories of the CPICB items (Religious, Moral, Scientific, Everyday) enables a rigorous control of low-level psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic features while testing higher-level (dis)beliefs. In the exploratory Study 1 (N=20), we developed and tested a preliminary version of the CPICB that had 480 items. After selecting 400 items that yielded the most consistent responses, we carried out a confirmatory test-retest Study 2 (N=40). Pre-registered data analyses confirmed excellent construct validity, internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the CPICB religious (dis)belief statements. We conclude that the CPICB is suitable for studying Christian beliefs in an experimental setting involving behavioural and neuroimaging paradigms, and provide Open Access to the inventory items, fostering further development of the experimental research of religious cognition.

Prediction differs at sentence and discourse level: An event-related potential study

This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how predicting upcoming words differ when contextual information used to generate the prediction is from the immediately preceding sentence context versus an earlier discourse context. Four-sentence discourses were presented to participants, with the critical words in the last sentences, either predictable or unpredictable based on sentence- or discourse-level contextual information. At the sentence level, the crucial contextual information for prediction was provided by the last sentence, where the critical word was embedded (e.g., Xiaoyu came to the living room. She made a cup of lemon tea. Then she sat down in a chair. She opened a box/an album to look at the pictures.), and at the discourse level by the first sentence (e.g., Xiaoyu took out a box/an album. She made a cup of lemon tea. Then she sat down in a chair. She leisurely looked at the pictures.). Results showed reduced N400 for predictable words compared to unpredictable counterparts at sentence and discourse levels and also a post-N400 positivity effect of predictability at sentence level. This suggests that both sentence- and discourse-level semantic information help readers predict upcoming words, but supportive sentence context more than discourse context.

Semantic associates create retroactive interference on an independent recall task

Semantic similarity between stimuli can cause false memories, but the extent to which it causes retroactive interference in recall has been less explored. Here, subjects learned unique locations for “critical” words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, subjects centrally viewed words that were semantically associated with half of the critical words. Finally, subjects retrieved the critical word locations (to test recall) and distinguished them from previously unseen words (to test recognition). We found spatial memory impairments for critical words whose semantic associates were shown (vs. not shown), suggesting that semantic material caused retroactive interference, even on a test of unrelated content (i.e., spatial versus semantic). This effect was present in three experiments when the interfering information was presented shortly before spatial recall, but not after a one-hour delay between associate learning and test or after swapping the order of the spatial and associate phases. Moreover, impairments occurred whether or not subjects were aware of the semantic relatedness between critical and associate words and consistently occurred when the associates had low-to-moderate strength in predicting the critical words. By contrast, swapping the order of the two learning phases increased critical word recognition in a manner that scaled linearly with associate-to-critical word strength. These findings suggest that memory impairments can occur solely via semantic associates on an independent task where all relevant responses are freely available; in this way, they cannot be attributed to any conventional account of retroactive interference.

Gesture’s body orientation modulates the N400 during semantic integration of gesture and visual sentence

Body orientation of gesture entails social-communicative intention, and may thus influence how gestures are perceived and comprehended together with auditory speech during face-to-face communication. To date, despite the emergence of neuroscientific literature on the role of body orientation on hand action perception, limited studies have directly investigated the role of body orientation in the interaction between gesture and language. To address this research question, we carried out an EEG experiment presenting to participants (n=21) videos of frontal and lateral hand gestures of five-seconds (e.g., raising a hand), followed by visually presented sentences that are either congruent or incongruent with the hand gesture (e.g., ‘the mountain is high/low…’). All participants underwent a semantic-probe task, judging whether a target word is related or unrelated to the gesture-speech event. EEG results suggest that, during the perception phase of hand-gestures, while both frontal and lateral gestures elicited power decrease in both the alpha (8-12Hz) and the beta (16-24Hz) bands, lateral gestures elicited reduced power decrease in the beta band when compared with frontal gestures. For sentence comprehension, at the critical word whose meaning is congruent/incongruent with the gesture, frontal gestures elicited an N400 effect for gesture-sentence incongruency. More importantly, this incongruency effect was significantly reduced for lateral gestures. The findings suggest that body orientation plays a crucial role in gesture perception, and that its inferred social-communicative intention influences gesture-sentence semantic integration in an interactive manner.