Presentations

Displaying 1 - 7 of 7
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Lewis, A. G. (2015). Using neural oscillations to investigate semantic and syntactic processing. Talk presented at University of KwaZulu-Natal, Linguistics Department [Invited Seminar]. Durban, South Africa. 2015-02-26.

    Abstract

    This talk will be divided into three parts. First I will provide some arguments about why we might want to investigate neural oscillations in relation to cognitive phenomena in the first place. I will then present some data investigating embodied semantics in Spanish using mu oscillations as an index of motor-related cortical activity. Finally, I will offer some (very) preliminary findings from a study investigating the relationship between theta and beta oscillations and the processing of agreement relations (and violations) in Dutch.

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