The invisible made visible?

With the starting point in a story about a dancer with a profound disability, the topic for critical discussion in this article is prenatal diagnosis in the Nordic countries in light of concepts of what it means to be human and human fulfilment. More specifically, the focus is on human life with limited capabilities and how a widened view of such a life is crucial in the task of creating a society where all human beings can be perceived as desirable and of equal worth. In the first part of this article the practice of prenatal diagnosis is showed to be filled with narrow conceptions of what it means to be human and perspectives are brought to light that can be argued to have been made invisible in the introduction and implementation of prenatal diagnosis in the Nordic countries as well as in the ethical debate. In the second part, the vision and actualization of L'Arche is discussed as an example of how befriending people with disabilities can challenge mainstream ethical narratives and widen a narrow view of morality and what it means to be human.     

Relating numeric cognition and language processing: Do numbers and words share a common representational platform?

Numerical processing and language processing are both grounded in space. In the present study we investigated whether these are fully independent phenomena, or whether they share a common basis. If number processing activates spatial dimensions that are also relevant for understanding words, then we can expect that processing numbers may influence subsequent lexical access to words. Specifically, if high numbers relate to upper space, then they can be expected to facilitate understanding of words such as bird that are having referents typically found in the upper vertical space. The opposite should hold for low numbers. These should facilitate the understanding of words such as ground referring to entities with referents in the lower vertical space. Indeed, in two experiments we found evidence for such an interaction between number and word processing. By eliminating a contribution of linguistic factors gained from additional investigations on large text corpora, this strongly suggests that understanding numbers and language is based on similar modal representations in the brain. The implications of these findings for a broader perspective on grounded cognition will be discussed.     

Environmental sound priming: Does negation modify N400 cross-modal priming effects?

Human information processing is incredibly fast and flexible. In order to survive, the human brain has to integrate information from various sources and to derive a coherent interpretation, ideally leading to adequate behavior. In experimental setups, such integration phenomena are often investigated in terms of cross-modal association effects. Interestingly, to date, most of these cross-modal association effects using linguistic stimuli have shown that single words can influence the processing of non-linguistic stimuli, and vice versa. In the present study, we were particularly interested in how far linguistic input beyond single words influences the processing of non-linguistic stimuli; in our case, environmental sounds. Participants read sentences either in an affirmative or negated version: for example: “The dog does (not) bark”. Subsequently, participants listened to a sound either matching or mismatching the affirmative version of the sentence (‘woof’ vs. ‘meow’, respectively). In line with previous studies, we found a clear N400-like effect during sound perception following affirmative sentences. Interestingly, this effect was identically present following negated sentences, and the negation operator did not modulate the cross-modal association effect observed between the content words of the sentence and the sound. In summary, these results suggest that negation is not incorporated during information processing in a manner that word–sound association effects would be influenced.     

Event-related brain potentials and the efficiency of visual search for vertically and horizontally oriented stimuli

Reports that visual search is more efficient for vertically than for horizontally shaded objects suggested that search is influenced by a priori knowledge about the source of light. In this study, we examined search for targets defined by the orientation of luminance gradients and measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs). In Experiment 1, we examined search for stimuli that comprised gradual luminance differences. Response times showed the expected orientation anisotropy effect. ERP amplitudes in the P1 latency range were slightly more positive in response to horizontally oriented stimuli, whereas P3 amplitudes were more positive in response to nonsingleton vertically oriented stimuli. Experiment 2 compared search for stimuli that comprised gradual versus step differences in luminance. All the anisotropies that we observed in Experiment 1 could be replicated in Experiment 2. Moreover, these anisotropies were not dependent on the type of the luminance gradient. This finding is inconsistent with the view that search efficiency is influenced by a priori knowledge about the source of light. The behavioral and electrophysiological data are consistent with a context model of visual search. We propose that contextual modulation reduces redundancy and contributes to computing the saliency of visual information by implementing divisive normalization and multiplicative filtering.     

Semantic Similarity of Alternatives Fostered by Conversational Negation

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation.