Graded expectations in visually situated comprehension: Costs and benefits as indexed by the N400

Recently, Ankener et al. (Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2387, 2018) presented a visual world study which combined both attention and pupillary measures to demonstrate that anticipating a target results in lower effort to integrate that target (noun). However, they found no indication that the anticipatory processes themselves, i.e., the reduction of uncertainty about upcoming referents, results in processing effort (cf. Linzen and Jaeger, Cognitive Science, 40(6), 1382–1411, 2016). In contrast, Maess et al. (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, 1–11, 2016) found that more constraining verbs elicited a higher N400 amplitude than unconstraining verbs. The aim of the present study was therefore twofold: Firstly, we examined whether the graded ICA effect, which was previously found on the noun as a result of a likelihood manipulation, replicates in ERP measures. Secondly, we set out to investigate whether the processes leading to the generation of expectations (derived during verb and scene processing) induce an N400 modulation. Our results confirm that visual context is combined with the verb’s meaning to establish expectations about upcoming nouns and that these expectations affect the retrieval of the upcoming noun (modulated N400 on the noun). Importantly, however, we find no evidence for different costs in generating more or less specific expectations for upcoming nouns. Thus, the benefits of generating expectations are not associated with any costs in situated language comprehension

Multimodal Surprisal in the N400 and the Index of Cognitive Activity

A word’s predictability or surprisal, as determined by cloze probabilities or language models (e.g. Frank, Otten, Galli, & Vigliocco, 2015) is related to processing effort, in that less ex- pected words take more effort to process (e.g. Hale, 2001). A words surprisal, however, may also be influenced by the non- linguistic context, such as visual cues: In the visual world paradigm (VWP), for example, anticipatory eye movements suggest that comprehenders exploit the scene to predict what will be mentioned next (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). How vi- sual context affects word surprisal and processing effort, how- ever, remains unclear. Here, we present evidence that visually- determined probabilistic expectations for a spoken target word predict graded processing effort for that word, in both pupil- lometric (ICA) and ERP (N400) measures. These findings demonstrate that the non-linguistic context can immediately influence both lexical expectations, and surprisal-based pro- cessing effort

PDE8A genetic variation, polycystic ovary syndrome and androgen levels in women

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is characterized by excessive theca cell androgen secretion, dependent upon LH, which acts through the intermediacy of 3′,5′-cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP). cAMP signaling pathways are controlled through regulation of its synthesis by adenylyl cyclases, and cAMP degradation by phosphodiesterases (PDEs). PDE8A, a high-affinity cAMP-specific PDE is expressed in the ovary and testis. Leydig cells from mice with a targeted mutation in the Pde8a gene are sensitized to the action of LH in terms of testosterone production. These observations led us to evaluate the human PDE8A gene as a PCOS candidate gene, and the hypothesis that reduced PDE8A activity or expression would contribute to excessive ovarian androgen production. We identified a rare variant (R136Q; NM_002605.2 c.407G > A) and studied another known single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) (rs62019510, N401S) in the PDE8A coding sequence causing non-synonymous amino acid substitutions, and a new SNP in the promoter region (NT_010274.16:g.490155G > A). Although PDE8A kinetics were consistent with reduced activity in theca cell lysates, study of the expressed variants did not confirm reduced activity in cell-free assays. Sub-cellular localization of the enzyme was also not different among the coding sequence variants. The PDE8A promoter SNP and a previously described promoter SNP did not affect promoter activity in in vitro assays. The more common coding sequence SNP (N401S), and the promoter SNPs were not associated with PCOS in our transmission/disequilibrium test-based analysis, nor where they associated with total testosterone or dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate levels. These findings exclude a significant role for PDE8A as a PCOS candidate gene, and as a Las major determinant of androgen levels in women

High-density single-nucleotide polymorphism maps of the human genome

Here we report a large, extensively characterized set of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) covering the human genome. We determined the allele frequencies of 55,018 SNPs in African Americans, Asians (Japanese-Chinese), and European Americans as part of The SNP Consortium's Allele Frequency Project. A subset of 8333 SNPs was also characterized in Koreans. Because these SNPs were ascertained in the same way, the data set is particularly useful for modeling. Our results document that much genetic variation is shared among populations. For autosomes, some 44% of these SNPs have a minor allele frequency >= 10% in each population, and the average allele frequency differences between populations with different continental origins are less than 19%. However, the several percentage point allele frequency differences among the closely related Korean, Japanese, and Chinese populations suggest caution in using mixtures of well-established populations for case-control genetic studies of complex traits. We estimate that similar to 7% of these SNPs are private SNPs with minor allele frequencies 60%) can be used for admixture studies. High-density maps of high-quality, characterized SNPs produced by this project are freely available. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved