[Koglist] ELTE Cognitive Seminar: Bálint Forgács - Babies’ understanding of understanding: ERPs at the intersection of social cognition & language comprehension

Dear All, We would like to invite you to the first event from the ELTE Cognitive Seminar series for the new academic year: *Bálint Forgács* *Babies’ understanding of understanding: ERPs at the intersection of social cognition & language comprehension* Place: ELTE-PPK, Institute of Psychology, Izabella utca 46, room 405 Time: September 14th, 2016 (Wednesday), 10:30-12:00 Summary: Infants already at 7 months of age seem to be tracking other people’s beliefs, and under certain conditions, already at 9 months of age seem to exhibit the N400 event related potential component, a neural marker of semantic incongruity detection well known in adults. In our study we wanted to investigate whether infants, similarly to adults, evaluate utterances from the perspective of a potential communicative partner. In order to investigate such social aspects of language processing, we presented various toys to 14-month-old infants, named them in the presence of an adult observer, and measured their electroencephalogram (EEG). On the basis of previous studies, we chose fifteen toys for which the labels are suspected to be known to infants, and named them by playing an audio file. We measured the infants’ ERPs time-locked to the onset of the object’s name. Half of the time the object was named congruently from the perspective of the infant, but incongruently from the perspective of the observer (who had a false belief about the identity of the object), and half of the time it was named congruently from both of their perspectives. Therefore, infants experienced a correct object label at all times, but the observer had either a true or a false belief about the identity of the object at the time of the object naming. Preliminary analysis of the ERPs revealed that the label incongruent for the observer evoked a greater negativity in the 300-500 ms time window over centro-parietal electrode sites in infants compared to the label congruent for both parties (p < .05). Further analyses and control experiments are under way, but the present finding already suggests that infants use their language comprehension system right from the onset to evaluate not only their own, but also their communicative partner’s comprehension of utterances. Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1769881429954285/ Best regards, Petia Kojouharova