José M. Díaz

To Know or Not to Know: Comprehending Protagonists' Beliefs and Their Emotional Consequences

Six experiments explored how readers take the protagonists mental perspective in stories involving conflicting beliefs about a situation. Experiments 1. 2 and 3 demonstrated that readers with privileged information build emotional inferences corresponding to the protagonists (wrong) beliefs. The time course of inferences was studied in Experiments 2, 4, 5, and 6. The results suggest that inferences related to the protagonists beliefs are backward inferences at the text integration stage. Experiment 3 showed that negation markers are not necessary for mental perspective effects. It was concluded that readers as side participants are able to dissociate the protagonists and their own beliefs about a narrative situation.

Processing of temporal information: Evidence from eye movements

Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain In two experiments, we recorded eye movements to study how readers monitor temporal order information contained in narrative texts. Participants read short texts containing critical temporal information in the sixth sentence, which could be either consistent or inconsistent with temporal order information given in the second sentence. In Experiment 1, inconsistent sentences yielded more regressions to the second sentence and longer refixations of it. In Experiment 2, this pattern of eye movements was shown only by readers who noticed the inconsistency and were able to report it. Theoretical and methodological implications of the results for research on text comprehension are discussed.

Discourse-based emotional consistency modulates early and middle components of event-related potentials.

In this study, participants read stories describing emotional episodes with either a positive or negative valence (Experiment 1). Following each story, participants were exposed to short sentences referring to the protagonist, and the event-related potential (ERP) for each sentences last word was recorded. Some sentences described the protagonists emotion, either consistent or inconsistent with the story; others were neutral; and others involved a semantically anomalous word. Inconsistent emotions were found to elicit larger N100/P200 and N400 than consistent emotions. However, when participants were exposed to the same critical sentences in a control experiment (Experiment 2) in which the stories had been removed, emotional consistency effects disappeared in all ERP components, demonstrating that these effects were discourse-level phenomena. By contrast, the ordinary N400 effect for locally anomalous words in the sentence was obtained both with and without story context. In conclusion, reading stories describing events with emotional significance determines strong and very early anticipations of an emotional word.

Figure and Ground in Temporal Sentences: The Role of the Adverbs When and While

Abstract Multiclause sentences with the temporal adverbs whileor whenreferring to simultaneous events (e.g., “While [when] John was writing a letter, Mary comes into the room”) were compared in German and Spanish. Following Talmy (2001), we assumed that the event in the main clause is the figure (F; the event to be located in time), and the event in the adverbial clause is the ground (G; the event used as temporal reference). Germans judged as more acceptable the while(während) sentences with the longer duration event as G (e.g., writing a letter) and the shorter duration event as F (e.g., coming into the room) than vice versa. However, they judged when(als) sentences quite acceptable in both duration conditions, suggesting that this adverb is temporally less constrained than while. Spaniards produced a similar, although less conspicuous, pattern. We discuss the results in terms of the temporal metrics that underlie F-G relations in adverbial sentences, as well as crosslinguistic differences between Spanish and German.

Chapter 11 Building referents of indeterminate sentences in the context of short narratives

Publisher Summary This chapter aims to study the comprehension of indeterminate or “abstract” sentences included in short texts. It explores how subjects build a representation of the reference for these indeterminate sentences, with an emphasis on the time course of the process. The processing of abstract versus concrete words has been a common topic of research within the framework of mental imagery. The chapter explores how sentences involving an indeterminate word are processed in the context of short narratives. The chapter aims to reveal the time course of instantiation in late context situations. Two possibilities are discussed. First is the immediate instantiation hypothesis: The reader computes the referent on-line while reading the indeterminate word/s. Second is the delayed instantiation hypothesis: The instantiation of the indeterminate sentence takes places several sentences after the word has been read.

Carefully Encoding Approach/Avoidance Body Locomotion With Interpersonal Conduct in Narrated Interactions

Approach and avoidance tendencies towards valenced others could be associated with our interpersonal conduct towards them: helping would be associated with approach tendency, and harming (or denying help) would be associated with avoidance. We propose that the encoding of this association enjoys attentional priority, as approach/avoidance representations of past interactions would regulate ones predisposition to either help or harm in subsequent interactions. Participants listened to interactions conveying positive/negative conduct between 2 characters. The conduct verb was then presented visually with a cue prompting participants to quickly step forward or backward. Subsequently, they performed a recognition task of noncentral story details. In matching conditions (positive conduct-step forward, negative conduct-step backward) the concurrent step should interfere with the encoding of motor representation of the conduct verb, and the verb encoding should divert attentional resources from the consolidation of memory traces of less relevant information. Results showed the predicted impairment in the recognition task in matching conditions, which supports an attentional bias towards encoding motor approach/avoidance representation of interpersonal conduct in the process of comprehending narrated interactions.

Understanding approach and avoidance in verbal descriptions of everyday actions: An ERP study

Understanding verbal descriptions of everyday actions could involve the neural representation of action direction (avoidance and approach) toward persons and things. We recorded the electrophysiological activity of participants while they were reading approach/avoidance action sentences that were directed toward a target: a thing/a person (i.e., “Petra accepted/rejected Ramón in her group”/ “Petra accepted/rejected the receipt of the bank”). We measured brain potentials time locked to the target word. In the case of things, we found a N400-like component with right frontal distribution modulated by approach/avoidance action. This component was more negative in avoidance than in approach sentences. In the case of persons, a later negative event-related potential (545–750 ms) with left frontal distribution was sensitive to verb direction, showing more negative amplitude for approach than avoidance actions. In addition, more negativity in approach-person sentences was associated with fear avoidance trait, whereas less negativity in avoidance-person sentences was associated with a greater approach trait. Our results support that verbal descriptions of approach/avoidance actions are encoded differently depending on whether the target is a thing or a person. Implications of these results for a social, emotional and motivational understanding of action language are discussed.