The Electrophysiological Underpinnings of Processing Gender Stereotypes in Language

Despite the widely documented influence of gender stereotypes on social behaviour, little is known about the electrophysiological substrates engaged in the processing of such information when conveyed by language. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we examined the brain response to third-person pronouns (lei “she” and lui “he”) that were implicitly primed by definitional (passeggera _FEM “passenger”, pensionato _MASC “pensioner”), or stereotypical antecedents (insegnante “teacher”, conducente “driver”). An N400-like effect on the pronoun emerged when it was preceded by a definitionally incongruent prime (passeggera _FEM – lui; pensionato _MASC – lei), and a stereotypically incongruent prime for masculine pronouns only (insegnante – lui). In addition, a P300-like effect was found when the pronoun was preceded by definitionally incongruent primes. However, this effect was observed for female, but not male participants. Overall, these results provide further evidence for on-line effects of stereotypical gender in language comprehension. Importantly, our results also suggest a gender stereotype asymmetry in that male and female stereotypes affected the processing of pronouns differently.     

Taking Perspective: Personal Pronouns Affect Experiential Aspects of Literary Reading

Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3^rd person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer’s perspective, whereas 2^nd person pronouns support an actor’s perspective. The direction of the effect for 1^st person pronouns seems to depend on the situational context. In the present study, we investigated how personal pronouns influence discourse comprehension when people read fiction stories and if this has consequences for affective components like emotion during reading or appreciation of the story. We wanted to find out if personal pronouns affect immersion and arousal, as well as appreciation of fiction. In a natural reading paradigm, we measured electrodermal activity and story immersion, while participants read literary stories with 1^st and 3^rd person pronouns referring to the protagonist. In addition, participants rated and ranked the stories for appreciation. Our results show that stories with 1^st person pronouns lead to higher immersion. Two factors—transportation into the story world and mental imagery during reading—in particular showed higher scores for 1^st person as compared to 3^rd person pronoun stories. In contrast, arousal as measured by electrodermal activity seemed tentatively higher for 3^rd person pronoun stories. The two measures of appreciation were not affected by the pronoun manipulation. Our findings underscore the importance of perspective for language processing, and additionally show which aspects of the narrative experience are influenced by a change in perspective.     

AGENCY, PERSONHOOD AND THE 'I' OF DISCOURSE IN THE PACIFIC AND BEYOND

Sahlins bases his account of Polynesian 'heroic history' partly on the fact that chiefs used the pronoun 'I' in reference to their whole group. Mosko (1992) argues that Sahlins's consequent emphasis on 'encompassment' as the modality of chiefly action is diametrically opposed to Strathern's on 'partibility', the effacement of parts of the person as a condition of action. Drawing on comparative material from the New Guinea Highlands, where big men also use 'I' for their whole group, and on Benveniste's and Urban's accounts of the meaning and use of personal pronouns, I argue instead that moments of both encompassment and partibility are inherent in language, corresponding to two distinct dimensions in which the pronouns are meaningful (the 'direct indexical' and the 'anaphoric'), and that close attention to the interaction between the two can yield new insights into the nature of personhood and social agency.     

A Cognitive Neural Architecture Able to Learn and Communicate through Natural Language

Communicative interactions involve a kind of procedural knowledge that is used by the human brain for processing verbal and nonverbal inputs and for language production. Although considerable work has been done on modeling human language abilities, it has been difficult to bring them together to a comprehensive tabula rasa system compatible with current knowledge of how verbal information is processed in the brain. This work presents a cognitive system, entirely based on a large-scale neural architecture, which was developed to shed light on the procedural knowledge involved in language elaboration. The main component of this system is the central executive, which is a supervising system that coordinates the other components of the working memory. In our model, the central executive is a neural network that takes as input the neural activation states of the short-term memory and yields as output mental actions, which control the flow of information among the working memory components through neural gating mechanisms. The proposed system is capable of learning to communicate through natural language starting from tabula rasa, without any a priori knowledge of the structure of phrases, meaning of words, role of the different classes of words, only by interacting with a human through a text-based interface, using an open-ended incremental learning process. It is able to learn nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns and other word classes, and to use them in expressive language. The model was validated on a corpus of 1587 input sentences, based on literature on early language assessment, at the level of about 4-years old child, and produced 521 output sentences, expressing a broad range of language processing functionalities.     

Polite plurals and adjective agreement

When an agreement controller such as a subject NP is a hybrid of contrasting syntactic and semantic features, the choice of syntactic versus semantic agreement depends on both the type of agreement target and the type of agreement controller. Two types of controller are contrasted: hybrid pronouns such as polite uses of the second person plural to refer to one addressee; and hybrid common nouns such as plurale tante. In some languages the pronoun type triggers singular on a predicate adjective and plural on the verb, while the common noun type triggers plural on both adjectives and verbs. The former pattern is explained in terms of underspecification of the pronoun: it is unspecified for the Concord number feature, to which adjectives are sensitive; but it carries a number feature on its referential Index, to which finite verbs are sensitive. An Agreement Marking Principle is proposed, according to which an agreement target checks the trigger for a syntactic phi feature, assigning that feature’s semantic interpretation to the trigger denotation if no syntactic feature is found.     

Fine-Grained,Local Maps and Coarse,Global Representations Support Human Spatial Working Memory

While sensory processes are tuned to particular features, such as an object''s specific location, color or orientation, visual working memory (vWM) is assumed to store information using representations, which generalize over a feature dimension. Additionally, current vWM models presume that different features or objects are stored independently. On the other hand, configurational effects, when observed, are supposed to mainly reflect encoding strategies. We show that the location of the target, relative to the display center and boundaries, and overall memory load influenced recall precision, indicating that, like sensory processes, capacity limited vWM resources are spatially tuned. When recalling one of three memory items the target distance from the display center was overestimated, similar to the error when only one item was memorized, but its distance from the memory items'' average position was underestimated, showing that not only individual memory items'' position, but also the global configuration of the memory array may be stored. Finally, presenting the non-target items at recall, consequently providing landmarks and configurational information, improved precision and accuracy of target recall. Similarly, when the non-target items were translated at recall, relative to their position in the initial display, a parallel displacement of the recalled target was observed. These findings suggest that fine-grained spatial information in vWM is represented in local maps whose resolution varies with distance from landmarks, such as the display center, while coarse representations are used to store the memory array configuration. Both these representations are updated at the time of recall.     

Spousal bereavement and the cognitive health of older adults in the US: New insights on channels,single items,and subjective evidence

This study provides novel insights into older adults’ cognitive functioning before and after widowhood onset and possible effect channels. It further examines gender heterogeneity in the adaptation to (anticipated or actual) spousal bereavement, comparing objective evidence with subjective evidence of cognitive abilities. We used longitudinal data of up to 26,584 participants of the Health and Retirement Study, aged over 50 at recruitment, assessed biennially between 1998 and 2016. Two-way fixed effects with dynamic treatment effects were estimated for various cognitive measures, including six aggregated indices and six single item scales. After adjusting for effect channels including depression, social vulnerability, and stress, there remained significant widowhood effects on older adults’ cognitive health. Using single item scales, we established the adverse contemporaneous and adaptation effects on bereaved older females’ short-term memory, semantic memory, and numeracy. For bereaved older males, working memory and focus-of-attention deteriorated after widowhood onset. Meanwhile, subjective memory rating remained intact, contrary to objective evidence. We conclude that cognitive transitions to and from widowhood can exhibit distinctive patterns across objective and subjective cognitive domains. With the effect channels in mind, cognitive intervention for widowed older adults should be tailored to the temporal distance to spousal loss, gender, and task.     

Integration in working memory: a magnetic stimulation study on the role of left anterior prefrontal cortex

Integration is a fundamental working memory operation, requiring the insertion of information from one task into the execution of another concurrent task. Previous neuroimaging studies have suggested the involvement of left anterior prefrontal cortex (L-aPFC) in relation to working memory integration demands, increasing during presentation of information to be integrated (loading), throughout its maintenance during a secondary task, up to the integration step, and then decreasing afterward (unloading). Here we used short bursts of 5 Hz repetitive Transcranic Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to modulate L-aPFC activity and to assess its causal role in integration. During experimental blocks, rTMS was applied (N = 10) over L-aPFC or vertex (control site) at different time-points of a task involving integration of a preloaded digit into a sequence of arithmetical steps, and contrasted with a closely matched task without integration demand (segregation). When rTMS was applied during the loading phase, reaction times during secondary task were faster, without significant changes in error rates. RTMS instead worsened performance when applied during information unloading. In contrast, no effects were observed when rTMS was applied during the other phases of integration, or during the segregation condition. These results confirm the hypothesis that L-aPFC is causally and selectively involved in the integration of information in working memory. They additionally suggest that pre-integration loading and post-integration unloading of information involving this area may be active and resource-consuming processes.     

Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation over the Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Decreases Medium Load Working Memory Performance in Healthy Humans

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a key role in working memory. Evidence indicates that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the DLPFC can interfere with working memory performance. Here we investigated for how long continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) over the DLPFC decreases working memory performance and whether the effect of cTBS on performance depends on working memory load. Forty healthy young subjects received either cTBS over the left DLPFC or sham stimulation before performing a 2-, and 3-back working memory letter task. An additional 0-back condition served as a non-memory-related control, measuring general attention. cTBS over the left DLPFC significantly impaired 2-back working memory performance for about 15 min, whereas 3-back and 0-back performances were not significantly affected. Our results indicate that the effect of left DLPFC cTBS on working memory performance lasts for roughly 15 min and depends on working memory load.     

Content-Specificity in Verbal Recall: A Randomized Controlled Study

In this controlled experiment we examined whether there are content effects in verbal short-term memory and working memory for verbal stimuli. Thirty-seven participants completed forward and backward digit and letter recall tasks, which were constructed to control for distance effects between stimuli. A maximum-likelihood mixed-effects logistic regression revealed main effects of direction of recall (forward vs backward) and content (digits vs letters). There was an interaction between type of recall and content, in which the recall of digits was superior to the recall of letters in verbal short-term memory but not in verbal working memory. These results demonstrate that the recall of information from verbal short-term memory is content-specific, whilst the recall of information from verbal working memory is content-general.     

Working memory in young schoolchildren: A study using event-related potentials

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to study working memory operations in young school-children. The type of information has proved to determine the specificity of encoding and retrieval processes in working memory. The formation of the trace and its comparison with new information for phonological stimuli requires involvement of the frontal cortical areas, whereas visual patterns are characterized by an enhanced late positive complex in the caudal areas.     

How the speed of working memory updating influences the on-line thematic processing of simple sentences in Mandarin Chinese

This ERP study used electrophysiological technique to examine how individual differences in the speed of working memory updating influence the use of syntactic and semantic information during on-line sentence argument interpretation, and the time course of that working memory updating effect. The basic structure of the experimental sentences was “Noun + Verb + adverb + ‘le’ + a two-character word”, with the Noun being the sentence initial argument. This initial argument is animate or inanimate and the following verb disambiguates it as an agent or patient. The results at the initial argument revealed that, the quick-updating group elicited a larger positivity over the frontal cortex (within 500–800 ms post-noun onset) as compared with the slow-updating group. At the following disambiguating verb, the slow-updating group only showed a word order effect, indicating that the patient-first condition elicited a larger P600 (within 500–1,000 ms post-verb onset) than the agent-first one; for the quick-updating group, at the early stage of processing, the patient-first sentences elicited a larger N400 (within 300–500 ms post-verb onset) than the agent-first ones only when the initial argument was inanimate; however, at the late stage, the patient-first sentences elicited an enhanced P600 (within 800–1,000 ms post-verb onset) only when the initial argument was animate. These results suggested that the speed of working memory updating not only influences the maintenance of sentence argument when the contents of working memory change but also influences the efficiency of integrating that argument with the verb at a late time point. When integrating the argument with the disambiguating verb, individuals with quick-updating ability can combine multiple sources of information (both noun animacy and word order), and conduct rapid and fine-grained two-stage processing; individuals with slow-updating ability, however, only rely on one dominant source of information types (word order), and conducted slow and course-grained processing.     

Domain-Specific Control of Selective Attention

Previous research has shown that loading information on working memory affects selective attention. However, whether the load effect on selective attention is domain-general or domain-specific remains unresolved. The domain-general effect refers to the findings that load in one content (e.g. phonological) domain in working memory influences processing in another content (e.g., visuospatial) domain. Attentional control supervises selection regardless of information domain. The domain-specific effect refers to the constraint of influence only when maintenance and processing operate in the same domain. Selective attention operates in a specific content domain. This study is designed to resolve this controversy. Across three experiments, we manipulated the type of representation maintained in working memory and the type of representation upon which the participants must exert control to resolve conflict and select a target into the focus of attention. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants maintained digits and nonverbalized objects, respectively, in working memory while selecting a target in a letter array. In Experiment 2, we presented auditory digits with a letter flanker task to exclude the involvement of resource competition within the same input modality. In Experiments 3a and 3b, we replaced the letter flanker task with an object flanker task while manipulating the memory load on object and digit representation, respectively. The results consistently showed that memory load modulated distractibility only when the stimuli of the two tasks were represented in the same domain. The magnitude of distractor interference was larger under high load than under low load, reflecting a lower efficacy of information prioritization. When the stimuli of the two tasks were represented in different domains, memory load did not modulate distractibility. Control of processing priority in selective attention demands domain-specific resources.     

海马参与工作记忆目标匹配增强及其时间过程——基于颅内脑电的研究

已有的研究结果表明,海马参与记忆的编码和提取,并且它会受到新发生事件与已存储记忆匹配或者不匹配的影响.先前的功能磁共振研究报道,在延迟匹配任务中,目标匹配增强作为一种工作记忆成分,与物体性质和位置的整合有关,能够显著地激活海马体部.但是,关于这一过程的时间信息目前尚不清楚.本研究利用特定癫痫病人在双侧海马植入的深部电极,跨被试间电极触点位置基本一致,因此具有较高的空间分辨率和时间分辨率的优势.我们发现,左侧海马体部在目标匹配增强中起着重要作用.同时,这种效应发生在探测刺激出现后600～650 ms,大约在知觉匹配增强或者P300等知觉效应后200 ms.另外,对于每一个被试,目标匹配增强的潜伏期与平均反应时成正相关.结果揭示,当工作记忆的任务与性质-位置捆绑有关时,海马参与并起重要作用.结果说明,目标匹配增强效应在知觉过程之后发生,表明了工作记忆不同成分在海马的分离.     

Content-specific working memory modulation of the attentional blink

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of working memory content on temporal attention in a rapid serial visual presentation attentional blink paradigm. It was shown that categorical similarity between working memory content and the target stimuli pertaining to the attentional task (both digits) increased attentional blink magnitude compared to a condition in which this similarity was absent (colors and digits, respectively). This effect was only observed when the items in working memory were not presented as conjunctions of the involved categories (i.e., colored digits). This suggested that storage and retrieval from working memory was at least preferentially conjunctive in this case. It was furthermore shown that the content of working memory enhanced the identification rate of the second target, by means of repetition priming, when inter-target lag was short and the attentional blink was in effect. The results are incompatible with theories of temporal attention that assume working memory has no causal role in the attentional blink and support theories that do.     

Ecological memory at millennial time-scales: the importance of data constraints,species longevity and niche features

Ecological memory describes how antecedent conditions drive the dynamics of an ecological system. Palaeoecological records are paramount to understand ecological memory at millennial time-scales, but the concept is widely neglected in the literature, and a formal approach is lacking. Here, we fill such a gap by introducing a quantitative framework for ecological memory in palaeoecology, and assessing how data constraints and taxa traits shape ecological memory patterns. We simulate the population dynamics and pollen abundance of 16 virtual taxa with different life and niche traits as a response to an environmental driver. The data is processed to mimic a realistic sediment deposition and sampled at increasing depth intervals. We quantify ecological memory with Random Forests, and assess how data properties and taxa traits shape ecological memory. We find that life-span and niche features modulate the relative importance of the antecedent values of the driver and the pollen abundance over periods of 240 yr and longer. Additionally, we find that accumulation rate and decreasing pollen-sampling resolution inflate the importance of antecedent pollen abundance. Our results suggest that: 1) ecological memory patterns are sensitive to varying accumulation rates. A better understanding on the numerical basis of this effect may enable the assimilation of ecological memory concepts and methods in palaeoecology; 2) incorporating niche theory and models is essential to better understand the nature of ecological memory patterns at millennial time-scales. 3) Long-lived generalist taxa are highly decoupled from the environmental signal. This finding has implications on how we interpret the abundance-environment relationship of real taxa with similar traits, and how we use such knowledge to forecast their distribution or reconstruct past climate.     

Mobile phone exposure and spatial memory

Radiofrequency (RF) emission during mobile phone use has been suggested to impair cognitive functions, that is, working memory. This study investigated the effects of a 2 1/2 h RF exposure (884 MHz) on spatial memory and learning, using a double-blind repeated measures design. The exposure was designed to mimic that experienced during a real-life mobile phone conversation. The design maximized the exposure to the left hemisphere. The average exposure was peak spatial specific absorption rate (psSAR10g) of 1.4 W/kg. The primary outcome measure was a "virtual" spatial navigation task modeled after the commonly used and validated Morris Water Maze. The distance traveled on each trial and the amount of improvement across trials (i.e., learning) were used as dependent variables. The participants were daily mobile phone users, with and without symptoms attributed to regular mobile phone use. Results revealed a main effect of RF exposure and a significant RF exposure by group effect on distance traveled during the trials. The symptomatic group improved their performance during RF exposure while there was no such effect in the non-symptomatic group. Until this new finding is further investigated, we can only speculate about the cause.     

The role of prefrontal cortex in working memory: examining the contents of consciousness.

Working memory enables us to hold in our ''mind''s eye'' the contents of our conscious awareness, even in the absence of sensory input, by maintaining an active representation of information for a brief period of time. In this review we consider the functional organization of the prefrontal cortex and its role in this cognitive process. First, we present evidence from brain-imaging studies that prefrontal cortex shows sustained activity during the delay period of visual working memory tasks, indicating that this cortex maintains on-line representations of stimuli after they are removed from view. We then present evidence for domain specificity within frontal cortex based on the type of information, with object working memory mediated by more ventral frontal regions and spatial working memory mediated by more dorsal frontal regions. We also propose that a second dimension for domain specificity within prefrontal cortex might exist for object working memory on the basis of the type of representation, with analytic representations maintained preferentially in the left hemisphere and image-based representations maintained preferentially in the right hemisphere. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility that there are prefrontal areas brought into play during the monitoring and manipulation of information in working memory in addition to those engaged during the maintenance of this information. Finally, we consider the relationship of prefrontal areas important for working memory, both to posterior visual processing areas and to prefrontal areas associated with long-term memory.     

Gender differences in brain networks during verbal Sternberg tasks: A simultaneous near‐infrared spectroscopy and electro‐encephalography study

Gender differences in psychological processes have been of great interest in a variety of fields including verbal fluency, emotion processing and working memory. Previous studies suggested that women outperform men in verbal working memory (VWM). However, the inherent mechanisms are still unclear. To obtain a deeper insight into the gender differences in brain networks in VWM, this study used near‐infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and electro‐encephalography (EEG) simultaneously to investigate gender‐related brain networks during verbal Sternberg tasks. NIRS results confirmed that women surpass men in VWM from the perspective of both brain activation and connectivity. Results of EEG (effective connectivity and event‐related spectral power) showed that men tend to use a more visuospatial strategy to encode memory. In addition, novel analysis methods of brain networks can provide useful information about the gender specifics of brain functions. Gender‐related pseudo‐color maps constructed from all channels of average HbO₂ activity during low‐ and high‐load tasks (from 0 to 6 seconds after beginning).      

Changes in Brain Network Efficiency and Working Memory Performance in Aging

Working memory is a complex psychological construct referring to the temporary storage and active processing of information. We used functional connectivity brain network metrics quantifying local and global efficiency of information transfer for predicting individual variability in working memory performance on an n-back task in both young (n = 14) and older (n = 15) adults. Individual differences in both local and global efficiency during the working memory task were significant predictors of working memory performance in addition to age (and an interaction between age and global efficiency). Decreases in local efficiency during the working memory task were associated with better working memory performance in both age cohorts. In contrast, increases in global efficiency were associated with much better working performance for young participants; however, increases in global efficiency were associated with a slight decrease in working memory performance for older participants. Individual differences in local and global efficiency during resting-state sessions were not significant predictors of working memory performance. Significant group whole-brain functional network decreases in local efficiency also were observed during the working memory task compared to rest, whereas no significant differences were observed in network global efficiency. These results are discussed in relation to recently developed models of age-related differences in working memory.