Ostarek and Huettig are organising a symposium 'Where next? The future of embodiment research' at ESCoP 2019 (25-28 September, Tenerife) with talks by Anna Borghi, Rolf Zwaan, Pia Knoeferle, Gabriella Vigliocco, and Markus Ostarek
How reading changes the way we think APRIL 20, 2018 From a research perspective, reading and writing is a fascinating phenomenon. After all, the first writing systems date back less than 6,000 years – the blink of an eye in the timescale of human evolution. How the human brain is nonetheless able to master this complex task is a key question. Current topics of scientific interest include exploring the differences between practised readers and illiterate individuals - and the consequences…
http://www.mpi.nl/large-scale-replication-study-challenges-key-evidence-for-the-pro-active-reading-brain
Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment (‘cloze’). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (N=334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated…
We have written an opinion article in the journal Language, Cognition and Neuroscience on how research with adult illiterates can inform dyslexia research. Here's the link to the open access article: Distinguishing cause from effect – many deficits associated with developmental dyslexia may be a consequence of reduced and suboptimal reading experience
We have published a Special Issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience on 'The Effects of Literacy on Cognition and Brain Functioning'. You can read the (open access) introduction to the special issue here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23273798.2018.1425803
http://www.ub.edu/bridgingattentionprediction/content/two-systems-account-predictive-processing A two-systems account of predictive processing Falk Huettig Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics I will present a mechanistic two-systems account of prediction. I will argue that predictive processing can be broadly divided into passive and active mechanisms influencing pre-activation of upcoming input. Passive mechanisms include associations (at all levels from phonetic/phonological to event structures), resting state level dynamics, structure repetition, regularity detection, and sharpening/fine-tuning of perceptual/cognitive structures and procedures. Active mechanisms include reasoning (logical inference, 'linguistic discourse processing', etc.),…
https://amlap2018asia.wordpress.com How learning to read changes mind and brain Abstract: Reading as a recent cultural invention has not been shaped by evolutionary processes and thus must make use of cognitive systems and brain networks which are either domain-general or have evolved for other purposes. Research on the effect of literacy thus is a powerful tool to investigate how cultural inventions impact on cognition and brain functioning. During my talk, will draw on evidence from both behavioural experiments and neurobiological studies.…
Our study in Science Advances on how illiterates' brains change when learning to read featured as one of 12 Max Planck Society research highlights of 2017