Members of the BLL-team will give some interessting presentations at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) Anual Meeting:

Data blitz presentation

Dr. Luigi Grisoni will give a data blitz presentation about "Correlated brain indexes of semantic prediction and prediction error: brain localization and category specificity". You can find the abstract at the bottom of the page.

Poster presentations

On top two BLL-members will present a poster:

Dr. Rosario Tomasello will talk about "Neurophysiological evidence for instantaneous processing of speech prosody conveying different communicative actions"

You can find more information HERE.

Marika Constant (under the supervision of Dr. Tomasello and Prof. Pulvermüller) will talk about "Neurobiological explanation of fast mapping in word acquisition: A brain-constrained cortex model"

You can find more information HERE.

Abstract Data blitz presentation:

Accurate predictions allow to understand a message easily and quickly, whereas unpredictable utterances require more processing. Consistently, previous evidences have shown a linear relationship between anticipatory signals occurring before predictable stimuli (Prediction Potential) and post-stimulus responses (Mismatch Negativity, MMN). However, since MMN paradigms are not ecological, as they are characterized by a highly redundant stimulus presentation, it remains to be investigated whether similar mechanisms also occur in situations closer to everyday experiences. We here demonstrate the interplay between prediction and perception during sentence comprehension. Sentence fragments constraining the expectation of a specific word induced anticipatory brain activity before the expected input; this slow-wave potential was absent in case of weak expectations. That this anticipatory slow wave was related to predictive processing was further demonstrated by correlations between this signal and both subjective reports of certainty about upcoming words and objective corpus-based measures, thus confirming this response as a semantic prediction potential (SPP). Furthermore, an inverse correlation between the SPP and the following N400 brain response suggested the interpretation of the N400 as a prediction error response. The sources underlying the pre- (SPP) and post-stimulus (N400) responses were located in inferior prefrontal and posterior temporal cortices, respectively. In addition, category-specific clusters of activation in modality-preferential visual and motor brain areas for animal- and tool-related words, respectively, indicated that both measures reflected aspects of sentence meaning. Overall, these data reveal that the N400, has an antecedent, the SPP which may determine the N400 dynamics.