The cognitive dynamics of negated sentence verification.

Abstract We explored the influence of negation on cognitive dynamics, measured using mouse-movement trajectories, to test the classic notion that negation acts as an operator on linguistic processing. In three experiments, participants verified the truth or falsity of simple statements, and we tracked the computer-mouse trajectories of their responses. Sentences expressing these facts sometimes contained a negation. Such negated statements could be true (e.g., ''elephants are not small'') or false (e.g., ''elephants are not large''). In the first experiment, as predicted by the classic notion of negation, we found that negation caused more discreteness in the mouse trajectory of a response. The second experiment induced a simple context for these statements, yet negation still increased discreteness in trajectories. A third experiment enhanced the pragmatic context of sentences, and the discreteness was substantially diminished, with one primary measure no longer significantly showing increased discreteness at all. Traditional linguistic theories predict rapid shifts in cognitive dynamics occur due to the nature of negation: It is an operator that reverses the truth or falsity of an interpretation. We argue that these results support both propositional and contextual accounts of negation present in the literature, suggesting that contextual factors are crucial for determining the kind of cognitive dynamics displayed. We conclude by drawing broader lessons about theories of cognition from the case of negation

Negation in context: evidence from the visual world paradigm

Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this task, we presented affirmative (e.g., her dad was rich) and negative sentences (e.g., her dad was not poor) while viewing two images of the affirmed and denied entities. The critical sentence in each item was preceded by one of three types of contexts: an inconsistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had little savings) that activates the negated situation (a poor man), a consistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had enough savings) that activates the actual situation (a rich man), or a neutral context (e.g., her dad lived on the other side of town) that activates neither of the two models previously suggested. The results corroborated our hypothesis. Pragmatics is implicated in the unfolding processing of negation. We found an increase in fixations on the target compared to the baseline for negative sentences at 800 ms in the neutral context, 600 ms in the inconsistent context, and 1450 ms in the consistent context. Thus, when the negated situation has been previously introduced via an inconsistent context, negation is facilitated

Grip Force Reveals the Context Sensitivity of Language-Induced Motor Activity during “Action Words

Studies demonstrating the involvement of motor brain structures in language processing typically focus on \ud time windows beyond the latencies of lexical-semantic access. Consequently, such studies remain inconclusive regarding whether motor brain structures are recruited directly in language processing or through post-linguistic conceptual imagery. In the present study, we introduce a grip-force sensor that allows online measurements of language-induced motor activity during sentence listening. We use this tool to investigate whether language-induced motor activity remains constant or is modulated in negative, as opposed to affirmative, linguistic contexts. Our findings demonstrate that this simple experimental paradigm can be used to study the online crosstalk between language and the motor systems in an ecological and economical manner. Our data further confirm that the motor brain structures that can be called upon during action word processing are not mandatorily involved; the crosstalk is asymmetrically\ud governed by the linguistic context and not vice versa

Mouse tracking as a window into decision making

International audienceMouse tracking promises to be an efficient method to investigate the dynamics of cognitive processes: It is easier to deploy than eyetracking, yet in principle it is much more fine-grained than looking at response times. We investigated these claimed benefits directly, asking how the features of decision processes—notably, decision changes—might be captured in mouse movements. We ran two experiments, one in which we explicitly manipulated whether our stimuli triggered a flip in decision, and one in which we replicated more ecological, classical mouse-tracking results on linguistic negation (Dale & Duran, Cognitive Science, 35, 983–996, 2011). We concluded, first, that spatial information (mouse path) is more important than temporal information (speed and acceleration) for detecting decision changes, and we offer a comparison of the sensitivities of various typical measures used in analyses of mouse tracking (area under the trajectory curve, direction flips, etc.). We do so using an “optimal” analysis of our data (a linear discriminant analysis explicitly trained to classify trajectories) and see what type of data (position, speed, or acceleration) it capitalizes on. We also quantify how its results compare with those based on more standard measures

The Role of Predictability During Negation Processing in Truth-Value Judgment Tasks

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., “The square/circle is (not) white”). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (1020)Peer Reviewe

"There is no item" vs. "I wish there were an item" : implicit negation causes false recall just as well as explicit negation

When talking about absence, we may express it in a negative statement (using explicit negation e.g. I was not) or in a positive statement (using implicit negation e.g. I wished I were). Previous research has shown that explicitly negated statements may cause false recall–negated items may paradoxically be remembered as present. The current study compares false recall caused by implicit and explicit negation. Participants listened to a recording in which some objects were mentioned as present, some as absent, and some not mentioned at all. The absence of objects was expressed using explicit or implicit negation. Participants’ recall of the recording was measured either five minutes or one week after exposure to the recording. Results indicate that implicit and explicit negation lead to a nearly identical false recall of negated items. However, items not mentioned in the recording (i.e. neither mentioned nor negated) were more often recognized as present by participants exposed to implicit, rather than explicit negation. We postulate that false recall of negated items could be explained by participants remembering the item itself, but forgetting the context in which it was present (an affirmative or a negative statement), hence objects would be recalled as present just because they were spoken of

Correction of evident falsehood requires explicit negation

The danger of receiving false information is omnipresent, and people might be highly vigilant against being influenced by falsehoods. Yet, as research on misinformation reveals, people are often biased by false information, even when they know the valid alternative. The question is why? The current research explores the relative encoding strength of two opposing alternatives involved in the correction of falsehood: the false concept and the valid concept. These encoding strengths may be critical for what people remember and how they act upon receiving false information. We compared two triggers for the correction of falsehood—a sentence consisting of clearly false information (e.g., “honey is made by butterflies”) and a sentence consisting of an explicit negation of this information (e.g., “honey is not made by butterflies”). The general pattern of results from five experiments demonstrates that the valid concept (e.g., “bees”) exhibits a weaker presence in memory than the false concept (e.g., “butterflies”) following the comprehension of evidently false information as compared to its explicit negation. Thus, the current research provides an answer to the riddle of the persistence of false information: False information is less likely to be mentally corrected if it is not explicitly negated. Even when people detect that a sentence is false, they tend to focus on the false concept rather than on the valid concept. These findings shed new light on extant research and offer fresh insights about the processing of false information and related phenomena such as the reliance on misinformation

The online processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives

While there is a substantial amount of evidence for language processing being a highly incremental and predictive process, we still know relatively little about how top-down discourse based expectations are combined with bottom-up information such as discourse connectives. The present article reports on three experiments investigating this question using different methodologies (visual world paradigm and ERPs) in two languages (German and English). We find support for highly incremental processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives, causing anticipation of upcoming material. Our visual world study shows that anticipatory looks depend on the discourse connective; furthermore, the German ERP study revealed an N400 effect on a gender-marked adjective preceding the target noun, when the target noun was inconsistent with the expectations elicited by the combination of context and discourse connective. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the facilitation of downstream material based on earlier connectives comes at the cost of reversing original expectations, as evidenced by a P600 effect on the concessive relative to the causal connective