Investigating the interplay between morphosyntax and event comprehension from the perspective of intersecting object histories.

In a series of sentence-picture verification studies we contrasted, for example, "… choose the balloon with "… inflate the balloon" and "… the inflated balloon" to examine the degree to which different representational components of event representation (specifically, the different object states entailed by the inflating event; minimally, the balloon in its uninflated and inflated states) are jointly activated after state-change verbs and past participles derived from them. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the initial and end states are both activated after state-change verbs, but that the initial state is considerably less accessible after participles. Experiment 3 showed that intensifier adverbs (e.

A novel approach to the assessment of higher-order rule learning in male mice.

Historically, the development of valid and reliable methods for assessing higher-order cognitive abilities (e.g., rule learning and transfer) has been difficult in rodent models.

Online eye tracking and real-time sentence processing: On opportunities and efficacy for capturing psycholinguistic effects of different magnitudes and diversity.

Online research methods have the potential to facilitate equitable accessibility to otherwise-expensive research resources, as well as to more diverse populations and language combinations than currently populate our studies. In psycholinguistics specifically, webcam-based eye tracking is emerging as a powerful online tool capable of capturing sentence processing effects in real time. The present paper asks whether webcam-based eye tracking provides the necessary granularity to replicate effects-crucially both large and small-that tracker-based eye tracking has shown.

Encoding and inhibition of arbitrary episodic context with abstract concepts.

Context is critical for conceptual processing, but the mechanism underpinning its encoding and reinstantiation during abstract concept processing is unclear. Context may be especially important for abstract concepts-we investigated whether episodic context is recruited differently when processing abstract compared with concrete concepts. Experiments 1 and 2 presented abstract and concrete words in arbitrary contexts at encoding (Experiment 1: red/green colored frames; Experiment 2: male/female voices).

Finding event structure in time: What recurrent neural networks can tell us about event structure in mind.

Under a theory of event representations that defines events as dynamic changes in objects across both time and space, as in the proposal of Intersecting Object Histories (Altmann & Ekves, 2019), the encoding of changes in state is a fundamental first step in building richer representations of events. In other words, there is an inherent dynamic that is captured by our knowledge of events. In the present study, we evaluated the degree to which this dynamic was inferable from just the linguistic signal, without access to visual, sensory, and embodied experience, using recurrent neural networks (RNNs).

Psychology of cleansing through the prism of intersecting object histories.

We link cleansing effects to contemporary cognitive theories via an account of event representation (intersecting object histories) that provides an explicit, neurally plausible mechanism for encoding objects (e.g., the self) and their associations (with other entities) across time.

The activation of object-state representations during online language comprehension.

Understanding the time-course of event knowledge activation is crucial for theories of language comprehension. We report two experiments using the 'visual world paradigm' (VWP) that investigated the dynamic mapping between object-state representations and real-time language processing. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences that described events resulting in either a substantial change of state (e.

Language as a mental travel guide.

Gilead et al.'s approach to human cognition places abstraction and prediction at the heart of "mental travel" under a "representational diversity" perspective that embraces foundational concepts in cognitive science. But, it gives insufficient credit to the possibility that the process of abstraction produces a gradient, and underestimates the importance of a highly influential domain in predictive cognition: language, and related, the emergence of experientially based structure through time.

Situational systematicity: A role for schema in understanding the differences between abstract and concrete concepts.

concepts differ from concrete concepts in several ways. Here, we focus on what we refer to as : The objects and relations that constitute an abstract concept (e.g.

The influence of state change on object representations in language comprehension.

To understand language people form mental representations of described situations. Linguistic cues are known to influence these representations. In the present study, participants were asked to verify whether the object presented in a picture was mentioned in the preceding words.

Events as intersecting object histories: A new theory of event representation.

We offer a new account of event representation based on those aspects of object representation that encode an object's , and which convey the distinct states that an object has experienced across time-minimally reflecting the and of whatever changes the object undergoes as an event unfolds. Our intention is to account for the of event representations. For an event that can be described as the event is defined by the changes in state and location, across time, of the onion, the chef, and any instruments that (might have) mediated the interaction between the chef and the onion.

Unfolding meaning in context: The dynamics of conceptual similarity.

How are relationships between concepts affected by the interplay between short-term contextual constraints and long-term conceptual knowledge? Across two studies we investigate the consequence of changes in visual context for the dynamics of conceptual processing. Participants' eye movements were tracked as they viewed a visual depiction of e.g.

Abstraction and generalization in statistical learning: implications for the relationship between semantic types and episodic tokens.

Statistical approaches to emergent knowledge have tended to focus on the process by which experience of individual episodes accumulates into generalizable experience across episodes. However, there is a seemingly opposite, but equally critical, process that such experience affords: the process by which, from a space of types (e.g.

Recalling what was where when seeing nothing there.

So-called "looks-at-nothing" have previously been used to show that recalling what also elicits the recall of where this was. Here, we present evidence from an eye-tracking study which shows that disrupting looks to "there" does not disrupt recalling what was there, nor do (anticipatory) looks to "there" facilitate recalling what was there. Therefore, our results suggest that recalling where does not recall what.

Knowing what, where, and when: event comprehension in language processing.

We investigated the retrieval of location information, and the deployment of attention to these locations, following (described) event-related location changes. In two visual world experiments, listeners viewed arrays with containers like a bowl, jar, pan, and jug, while hearing sentences like "The boy will pour the sweetcorn from the bowl into the jar, and he will pour the gravy from the pan into the jug. And then, he will taste the sweetcorn".

A cortical network for the encoding of object change.

Understanding events often requires recognizing unique stimuli as alternative, mutually exclusive states of the same persisting object. Using fMRI, we examined the neural mechanisms underlying the representation of object states and object-state changes. We found that subjective ratings of visual dissimilarity between a depicted object and an unseen alternative state of that object predicted the corresponding multivoxel pattern dissimilarity in early visual cortex during an imagery task, while late visual cortex patterns tracked dissimilarity among distinct objects.

Language-guided visual processing affects reasoning: the role of referential and spatial anchoring.

Language is more than a source of information for accessing higher-order conceptual knowledge. Indeed, language may determine how people perceive and interpret visual stimuli. Visual processing in linguistic contexts, for instance, mirrors language processing and happens incrementally, rather than through variously-oriented fixations over a particular scene.

The effect of object state-changes on event processing: do objects compete with themselves?

When an object is described as changing state during an event, do the representations of those states compete? The distinct states they represent cannot coexist at any one moment in time, yet each representation must be retrievable at the cost of suppressing the other possible object states. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging of human participants to test whether such competition does occur, and whether this competition between object states recruits brain areas sensitive to other forms of conflict. In Experiment 1, the same object was changed either substantially or minimally by one of two actions.

Attentional capture of objects referred to by spoken language.

Participants saw a small number of objects in a visual display and performed a visual detection or visual-discrimination task in the context of task-irrelevant spoken distractors. In each experiment, a visual cue was presented 400 ms after the onset of a spoken word. In experiments 1 and 2, the cue was an isoluminant color change and participants generated an eye movement to the target object.

The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses.

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several referents) met the pragmatic assumptions of relativization. Comprehension of the main and relative clauses of centre-embedded and right-branching structures was compared for each context.

Language can mediate eye movement control within 100 milliseconds, regardless of whether there is anything to move the eyes to.

The delay between the signal to move the eyes, and the execution of the corresponding eye movement, is variable, and skewed; with an early peak followed by a considerable tail. This skewed distribution renders the answer to the question "What is the delay between language input and saccade execution?" problematic; for a given task, there is no single number, only a distribution of numbers. Here, two previously published studies are reanalysed, whose designs enable us to answer, instead, the question: How long does it take, as the language unfolds, for the oculomotor system to demonstrate sensitivity to the distinction between "signal" (eye movements due to the unfolding language) and "noise" (eye movements due to extraneous factors)? In two studies, participants heard either 'the man…' or 'the girl…', and the distribution of launch times towards the concurrently, or previously, depicted man in response to these two inputs was calculated.

Looking at anything that is green when hearing "frog": how object surface colour and stored object colour knowledge influence language-mediated overt attention.

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the influence of stored colour knowledge, perceived surface colour, and conceptual category of visual objects on language-mediated overt attention. Participants heard spoken target words whose concepts are associated with a diagnostic colour (e.g.