Displaying 1 - 7 of 7
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Kunz, L., Lewis, A. G., Verdonschot, R. G., Hagoort, P., & Poletiek, F. H. (2023). I see, you see: An event-related potential Study of Theory of Mind in a Naturalistic VR Environment. Poster presented at the 19th NVP Winter Conference on Brain and Cognition, Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands.
Abstract
Effective communication involves recognizing the disparity between our own perspective and that of the recipient, influenced by factors such as stereotypes and accents. The extent to which Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to ascribe beliefs to others, plays a role in this process is uncertain. We anticipate individuals to speak in line with their beliefs, but what if their words conflict with our expectations? To investigate, we devised a virtual perspective-taking experiment where we manipulated a virtual agent's beliefs. Electroencephalography data were collected as participants listened to statements from the agent that either aligned or clashed with their true or false beliefs. We focused on the N400, an event-related brain component linked to word unexpectedness. As hypothesized, statements inconsistent with the agent's true beliefs triggered more pronounced N400 responses compared to matching statements. Furthermore, we anticipated that when the agent held a false belief, this knowledge would factor into interpreting their statements. Neither statements aligned with nor those diverging from the agent's false beliefs evoked N400 responses. This can be taken as evidence that participants did take the agents perspective into account. These results strongly support the role of Theory of Mind in language comprehension. -
Tan, Y., Lewis, A. G., Schmits, I., Verkes, R.-J., Cools, R., & Hagoort, P. (2023). Catecholaminergic modulation of garden-path sentence processing: An ERP study with methylphenidate. Poster presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2023), Marseille, France.
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Yao, J., Lewis, A. G., & Piai, V. (2023). Endogenous cortical rhythms of hierarchical structure building in language production. Poster presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2023), Marseille, France.
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Zioga, I., Zhou, Y. J., Weissbart, H., Lewis, A. G., Martin, A. E., & Haegens, S. (2023). Alpha and beta oscillations differentially support linguistic demands in a rule-switching task. Poster presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2023), Marseille, France.
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Zioga, I., Zhou, Y. J., Weissbart, H., Lewis, A. G., Martin, A. E., & Haegens, S. (2023). Alpha and beta oscillations differentially support linguistic demands in a rule-switching task. Poster presented at Neuroscience 2023, Washington, D.C, USA.
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Zioga, I., Weissbart, H., Lewis, A. G., Haegens, S., & Martin, A. E. (2023). Naturalistic spoken language comprehension is supported by alpha and beta oscillations. Poster presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2023), Marseille, France.
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Lewis, A. G. (2013). Neuronal oscillations in discourse comprehension. Talk presented at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Linguistics Department [Invited Seminar]. Durban, South Africa. 2013-02-20.
Abstract
Oscillatory neuronal dynamics during language comprehension has been investigated at the level of single words, and whole sentences. We have recently extended this work to investigate the influence of discourse-level factors on oscillatory activity measured using electroencephalography (EEG). This talk will be divided into three parts. First, I shall provide some background about discourse comprehension and its place in models of language processing. This will include an introduction to the memory, unification, and control (MUC) framework and how it allows us to relate such processing models to neural circuitry. Second, I shall sketch the background necessary to understand what neuronal oscillations tell us about how the brain processes language. Finally, I shall present some of our own findings illustrating that neuronal oscillations can allow us to track changes in the brain as readers comprehend (or fail to comprehend) short discourses.
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