Ellen Lau from University of Maryland and Mass General Hospital, will be giving the Brown Bag talk on Wednesday, April 13 at 12-1:20 in Tobin 521B. The title and abstract follow.
Context Effects in Comprehension: Active Prediction or Passive Priming?
Much previous work has shown that predictive contexts can facilitate processing of subsequent words, as evidenced by reductions in reaction times, reading times, and N400 amplitudes. In this talk I will discuss two candidate mechanisms that could account for many of these 'predictive' effects: 1) active prediction of upcoming material and 2) passive priming of upcoming material by concepts and scenarios activated in long-term memory. I will highlight some of the challenges of distinguishing between these mechanisms with classic sentence paradigms, and I will present new data from a study in which we use an artificial semantic priming paradigm in EEG, MEG, and fMRI to look for neural signatures that might be used to distinguish active prediction from passive priming in typical comprehension.
