Information structure effects on the processing of nouns and verbs: evidence from event-related brain potentials

Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals can reveal the cost required to deal with information structure mismatches in speech or in text contexts. The present study investigates the costs related to the processing of different associations between the syntactic categories of Noun and Verb and the information categories of Topic and Focus. It is hypothesized that – due to the very nature (respectively, predicative and non-predicative) of verbal and nominal reference – sentences with Topics realized by verbs, and Focuses realized by nouns, should impose greater processing demands, compared to the decoding of nominal Topics and verbal Focuses. Data from event-related potential (ERP) measurements revealed an N400 effect in response to both nouns encoded as Focus and verbs packaged as Topic, confirming that the cost associated with information structure processing follows discourse-driven expectations also with respect to the word-class level.

Auditory representations for long lasting sounds: Insights from neural oscillations and event-related brain potentials

Numerous studies revealed that the sound’s basic features like its frequency and intensity including their temporal dynamics are integrated in a unitary representation. That research focused on short, discrete sounds and mainly disregarded how our brain processes long lasting sounds. We review research utilizing the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related potential and neural oscillatory activity for studying representations for long lasting simple sounds such as sinusoidal tones and complex sounds like speech. We report evidence for a critical temporal constraint for the formation of adequate representations for sounds lasting >350 ms. However, we present research showing that the time-variant characteristics (auditory edges) within long lasting sounds exceeding 350 ms enables the formation of auditory representations. We argue that each edge may open an integration window for a sound representation and that the representations established in adjacent temporal windows of integration can be concatenated into an auditory representation of a long sound.

When two languages are competing

Past studies have shown that expert interpreters were better than novices at using contextual cues to anticipate upcoming information. However, whether such sensitivity to contextual cues can be traced by means of neural signatures is relatively unexplored. The present study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) along with a language-switching paradigm – including non-switched (Chinese–Chinese, L1–L1) and switched (Chinese–English, L1–L2) conditions – to investigate whether interpreters with many years of experience, interpreters with a few years of experience and post-graduate-level interpreting students differed in the way they process contextually congruent or incongruent sentence-final target words. The results show that while the manipulations of congruency and switching independently induced a strong brain response in all three groups, the interaction between the two factors elicited different patterns across groups during 500–700 ms: (1) while a sustained congruency effect was found in the two less-experienced groups for the switched condition, such an effect was observed in the most experienced group for both switched and non-switched conditions; (2) only the least-experienced group showed a frontal negativity towards incongruent trials in the switched condition. These 200 ms transient group differences revealed that it might be possible to trace the development of interpreting ability by examining the ERP components in a language-switching setting.

A fejlődés-pszichofiziológia 30 éve Magyarországon (1990–2020)

A magyarországi fejlődés-pszichofiziológia három évtizedes történetét összefoglaló tanulmány a jelentősebb kutatások eredményeit négy főbb témacsoportban mutatja be. Ezek: a) a fejlődés-pszichofiziológiai módszerekkel végzett kutatások kezdetei, b) a nemzetközi kutatási kapcsolatok főbb területei, c) az eseményhez kötött agyi potenciálok módszerével végzett kutatások hazai főbb eredményei, valamint azok nemzetközi beágyazottsága és trendjei, d) a kognitív fejlődés-idegtudomány önálló területének kialakulása. Az áttekintésben hangsúlyosan jelenik meg a kutatási terület szerves kapcsolódása a pszichológia releváns ágaihoz (fejlődés-, kísérleti, kognitív pszichológia) és vizsgált életkori szakaszaihoz, beleértve a humán fejlődés fiziológiai módszereket alkalmazó pszichológiai kutatásának teljes vertikumát a tipikustól az atipikusig, a csecsemőkortól az öregedésig. The review summarizes the three-decades history of developmental psychophysiology in Hungary and presents the significant scientific achievements in four thematic domains. These are: a) the first years of research using developmental psychophysiological methods, b) the main areas of international research relations, c) the main results of research using event-related brain potentials, and their international relations and trends, d) the rise of a new independent field called cognitive developmental neuroscience. The review highlights the important links between the research area and the relevant branches of psychology (developmental, experimental, cognitive psychology) as well as the age range studied, including the entire continuum of psychological research on human development using physiological methods, from typical to atypical, and from infancy to aging.

Neural excitability and sensory input determine intensity perception with opposing directions in initial cortical responses

Perception of sensory information is determined by stimulus features (e.g., intensity) and instantaneous neural states (e.g., excitability). Commonly, it is assumed that both are reflected similarly in evoked brain potentials, that is, larger amplitudes are associated with a stronger percept of a stimulus. We tested this assumption in a somatosensory discrimination task in humans, simultaneously assessing (i) single-trial excitatory post-synaptic currents inferred from short-latency somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs), (ii) pre-stimulus alpha oscillations (8–13 Hz), and (iii) peripheral nerve measures. Fluctuations of neural excitability shaped the perceived stimulus intensity already during the very first cortical response (at ~20 ms) yet demonstrating opposite neural signatures as compared to the effect of presented stimulus intensity. We reconcile this discrepancy via a common framework based on the modulation of electro-chemical membrane gradients linking neural states and responses, which calls for reconsidering conventional interpretations of brain potential magnitudes in stimulus intensity encoding.