Computational Linguistics & Phonetics Computational Linguistics & Phonetics Fachrichtung 4.7 Universität des Saarlandes

Distinguished Speakers in Language Science

2 June 2016, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7.4

When Expectancies Collide: the Interaction between Stimulus Plausibility and Congruency during a Cross-Modal Verification Task.

Moreno Coco
Leverhulme Research Fellow, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences University of Edinburgh

The cognitive architecture routinely relies on expectancy mechanisms to process the plausibility of stimuli and establish their sequential congruency. Electrophysiology research, for example, has shown that implausible (e.g., an odd word in a sentence), as well as, mis-matching stimuli (e.g., a narrative of scenes with an incongruent ending), elicit a negative shift of brain activity. In this talk, I will present evidences from mouse-tracking (study 1) and electrophysiology (study 2) uncovering the interaction between plausibility and congruency during a cross-modal verification task, where participants verified the content congruency of sentence and scene pairs that varied in plausibility. In study 1, we find that implausible but congruent stimuli triggered less accurate and slower responses, and were associated with more complex verification trajectories. In study 2, we find that:

(1) incongruent pairs elicited an early negative response (N100),

(2) implausible stimuli elicited a later negative response (N300) and finally

(3) incongruent and implausible pairs elicited a stronger negativity compared to congruent and implausible pairs, peaking at 400ms (N400).

Taken together, these studies demonstrate that the matching of congruency expectations is not sufficient for facilitating cognitive processing, but depends greatly on the plausibility of information that is being integrated.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Vera Demberg.