The influence of spatial representation on valence judgements: An event-related potential study

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the nature of space-valence congruency effects. We presented participants with up or down arrows at the centre of the screen and then asked participants to identify whether the following target words had the emotional valence. The target words included positive emotional words (e.g., “happy” and “delight”), negative emotional words (e.g., “sad” and “depressive”) and neutral words (e.g., “history” and “country”). Behavioural data showed that the positive targets were identified faster when they are primed by up arrows than when primed by down arrows, whereas the negative targets were identified faster when they are primed by down arrows than when primed by up arrows. The ERP analysis showed larger P2 amplitudes were found in the congruent condition (i.e., the positive targets following up arrows or the negative targets following down arrows) than in the incongruent condition (i.e., the positive targets following down arrows or the negative targets following up arrows). Furthermore, larger N400 amplitudes were found in the incongruent condition compared with the congruent condition. Moreover, larger LPC amplitudes were found in the congruent condition compared with the incongruent condition. Therefore, in addition to replicating the space-valence congruency effects in a neutral/emotional judgement task, our study also extended previous studies by showing that spatial information modulates the processing of the emotional words at multiple stages.     

ERP evidence for conceptual mappings and comparison processes during the comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors

Cognitive linguists suggest that understanding metaphors requires activation of conceptual mappings between the involved concepts. We tested whether mappings are indeed in use during metaphor comprehension, and what mapping means as a cognitive process with Event-Related Potentials. Participants read literal, conventional metaphorical, novel metaphorical, and anomalous target sentences preceded by primes with related or unrelated mappings. Experiment 1 used sentence-primes to activate related mappings, and Experiment 2 used simile-primes to induce comparison thinking. In the unprimed conditions of both experiments, metaphors elicited N400s more negative than the literals. In Experiment 1, related sentence-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in conventional, but not in novel metaphors. In Experiment 2, related simile-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in novel, but not clearly in conventional metaphors. We suggest that mapping as a process occurs in metaphors, and the ways in which it can be facilitated by comparison differ between conventional and novel metaphors.     

Electrophysiological evidence for modulation of lexical processing after repetitive exposure to foreign phonotactic rules

In two experiments we investigate how repeated exposure to native and non-native phonotactic regularities alters the N400, an event-related potential related to lexico-semantic access. Participants underwent a Passive Listening (Experiment 1) or a Categorization Training (Experiment 2) for monosyllabic pseudowords over 3 days. During Passive Listening participants solely listened to the stimuli while for Categorization Training they learned to assign items to two arbitrary categories by feedback. Notably, this task did not rely on phonotactic regularities. Before training, N400 was larger for legal compared to illegal items. Over the 3-day exposure Passive Listening yielded a significant decrease in N400-amplitude for illegal pseudowords, however, this effect was abolished and partially inverted by the Categorization Training. We suggest the decrease in N400-amplitude indicates more efficient discrimination between native and non-native pseudowords since only the former are potential lexical candidates. On the contrary, Categorization Training introduces a ‘protosemantic’ context overriding prelexical selection processes.     

Comprensión del lenguaje y potenciales evocados

Resumen

En este trabajo se pretende dar cuenta de los últimos adelantos en el campo de los procesos relacionados con la comprensión del lenguaje y los potenciales evocados. Estos han mostrado ser herramientas útiles para el estudio de dichos procesos. Para ello se revisan una serie de estudios relacionados con los componentes que clásicamente han venido recibiendo una mayor atención. Así, el Potencial de Reconocimiento y la N400, parecen guardar relación con aspectos semánticos. Por otro lado, la Negatividad Izquierda Anterior Temprana y la P600 estarían más relacionados con los sintácticos. También se mencionan otros componentes, como la P300 y algunos que ha recibido menor atención.     

青少年风险决策的时程加工机制：来自ERP的证据

采用事件相关电位（ERP）研究技术,运用剑桥风险任务的实验范式,考察了青少年风险决策的时程加工机制。行为结果表明,在高、中、低三种不确定性条件下,相对于效价,被试的决策更多的关注概率。脑电结果显示：1）不确定性的主效应在N400上表现显著,高不确定条件和中不确定条件的波幅要明显大于低不确定性条件的波幅,而高不确定条件和中不确定条件的波幅无显著差异;2）与中不确定条件相比,高不确定条件和低不确定条件诱发了一个新异正成分（LPC）,高不确定条件和低不确定条件的波幅要明显大于中不确定性条件的波幅,而高不确定条件和低不确定条件的波幅无显著差异。青少年在风险任务中的决策较多的是选择安全选项,表现出较为明显的风险规避倾向。N400的波幅可能反映了不确定性程度,而LPC的波幅大小可能反映了结果评价准确性程度的高低。     

Are depictive gestures like pictures? commonalities and differences in semantic processing

Conversation is multi-modal, involving both talk and gesture. Does understanding depictive gestures engage processes similar to those recruited in the comprehension of drawings or photographs? Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from neurotypical adults as they viewed spontaneously produced depictive gestures preceded by congruent and incongruent contexts. Gestures were presented either dynamically in short, soundless video-clips, or statically as freeze frames extracted from gesture videos. In a separate ERP experiment, the same participants viewed related or unrelated pairs of photographs depicting common real-world objects. Both object photos and gesture stimuli elicited less negative ERPs from 400 to 600 ms post-stimulus when preceded by matching versus mismatching contexts (dN450). Object photos and static gesture stills also elicited less negative ERPs between 300 and 400 ms post-stimulus (dN300). Findings demonstrate commonalities between the conceptual integration processes underlying the interpretation of iconic gestures and other types of image-based representations of the visual world.     

Interplay between acoustic/phonetic and semantic processes during spoken sentence comprehension: an ERP study

When listening to speech in everyday-life situations, our cognitive system must often cope with signal instabilities such as sudden breaks, mispronunciations, interfering noises or reverberations potentially causing disruptions at the acoustic/phonetic interface and preventing efficient lexical access and semantic integration. The physiological mechanisms allowing listeners to react instantaneously to such fast and unexpected perturbations in order to maintain intelligibility of the delivered message are still partly unknown. The present electroencephalography (EEG) study aimed at investigating the cortical responses to real-time detection of a sudden acoustic/phonetic change occurring in connected speech and how these mechanisms interfere with semantic integration. Participants listened to sentences in which final words could contain signal reversals along the temporal dimension (time-reversed speech) of varying durations and could have either a low- or high-cloze probability within sentence context. Results revealed that early detection of the acoustic/phonetic change elicited a fronto-central negativity shortly after the onset of the manipulation that matched the spatio-temporal features of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) recorded in the same participants during an oddball paradigm. Time reversal also affected late event-related potentials (ERPs) reflecting semantic expectancies (N400) differently when words were predictable or not from the sentence context. These findings are discussed in the context of brain signatures to transient acoustic/phonetic variations in speech. They contribute to a better understanding of natural speech comprehension as they show that acoustic/phonetic information and semantic knowledge strongly interact under adverse conditions.     

Thinking ahead or not? Natural aging and anticipation during reading

Despite growing evidence of young adults neurally pre-activating word features during sentence comprehension, less clear is the degree to which this generalizes to older adults. Using ERPs, we tested for linguistic prediction in younger and older readers by means of indefinite articles (a’s and an’s) preceding more and less probable noun continuations. Although both groups exhibited cloze probability-graded noun N400s, only the young showed significant article effects, indicating probabilistic sensitivity to the phonology of anticipated upcoming nouns. Additionally, both age groups exhibited prolonged increased frontal positivities to less probable nouns, although in older adults this effect was prominent only in a subset with high verbal fluency (VF). This ERP positivity to contextual constraint violations offers additional support for prediction in the young. For high VF older adults, the positivity may indicate they, too, engage in some form of linguistic pre-processing when implicitly cued, as may have occurred via the articles.     

Career choice and orality

The field of vocational psychology is replete with schemata for the determinants of career choice in adulthood (e.g., A. Roe, The psychology of occupations. New York: Wiley, 1956; D. E. Super, The psychology of careers. New York: Harper &Row, 1957; J. O. Crites, Vocational psychology: The study of vocational behavior and development. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969). A view not given much weight in empirical research in this area is that of psychoanalytic theory relating career choice to unresolved childhood conflicts and their derivatives. To examine the validity of this psychoanalytic prediction, students' Rorschach protocols were analyzed to yield an index of frustrated oral needs. The students were given decks of careers to rank from most to least preferable. Results showed that the ranking of the oral careers was a function of the Rorschach index of frustrated oral needs for women only but not for men.     

汉字模糊度、字频和语义启动在N400上的交互作用：N400的IA模型的证据

通过两个实验, 采用事件相关电位技术, 记录大学生被试在同一字判断任务中的脑电波形。两个实验涉及三个因素, 包括模糊度、字频和语义, 语义和字频为被试内设计, 以启动字-靶字(模糊)-探测字的呈现序列为一个测试(trial), 要求被试判断靶字和探测字是否是同一个字。两个实验除了靶字的模糊度不同外, 其他材料完全相同。结果发现, 实验1字频和语义启动间存在交互作用, 其中低频条件下无语义启动比语义启动的N400波幅更偏负, 高频条件则无这种差异; 实验2中只存在语义启动效应, 字频与语义启动间不存在交互作用; 综合两个实验的ERP结果, 模糊度、字频和语义启动三者间存在交互作用, 且高频而非低频条件下模糊度与语义间也有交互作用, 无启动条件下字频和模糊度间也存在交互作用。本研究因此支持N400的IA模型(交互激活模型), 不支持核证模型和词汇后加工理论。