TY - JOUR A1 - Fischer, Rico A1 - Ventura-Bort, Carlos A1 - Hamm, Alfons O. A1 - Weymar, Mathias T1 - Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) enhances conflict-triggered adjustment of cognitive control JF - Cognitive, affective, & behavioral neuroscience : a journal of the Psychonomic Society N2 - Response conflicts play a prominent role in the flexible adaptation of behavior as they represent context-signals that indicate the necessity for the recruitment of cognitive control. Previous studies have highlighted the functional roles of the affectively aversive and arousing quality of the conflict signal in triggering the adaptation process. To further test this potential link with arousal, participants performed a response conflict task in two separate sessions with either transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), which is assumed to activate the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NE) system, or with neutral sham stimulation. In both sessions the N2 and P3 event-related potentials (ERP) were assessed. In line with previous findings, conflict interference, the N2 and P3 amplitude were reduced after conflict. Most importantly, this adaptation to conflict was enhanced under tVNS compared to sham stimulation for conflict interference and the N2 amplitude. No effect of tVNS on the P3 component was found. These findings suggest that tVNS increases behavioral and electrophysiological markers of adaptation to conflict. Results are discussed in the context of the potentially underlying LC-NE and other neuromodulatory (e.g., GABA) systems. The present findings add important pieces to the understanding of the neurophysiological mechanisms of conflict-triggered adjustment of cognitive control. KW - Conflict adaptation KW - Cognitive control KW - Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation KW - tVNS KW - ERP KW - N2 Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-018-0596-2 SN - 1530-7026 SN - 1531-135X VL - 18 IS - 4 SP - 680 EP - 693 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schoknecht, Pia A1 - Roehm, Dietmar A1 - Schlesewsky, Matthias A1 - Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina T1 - The interaction of predictive processing and similarity-based retrieval interference BT - an ERP study JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience N2 - Language processing requires memory retrieval to integrate current input with previous context and making predictions about upcoming input. We propose that prediction and retrieval are two sides of the same coin, i.e. functionally the same, as they both activate memory representations. Under this assumption, memory retrieval and prediction should interact: Retrieval interference can only occur at a word that triggers retrieval and a fully predicted word would not do that. The present study investigated the proposed interaction with event-related potentials (ERPs) during the processing of sentence pairs in German. Predictability was measured via cloze probability. Memory retrieval was manipulated via the position of a distractor inducing proactive or retroactive similarity-based interference. Linear mixed model analyses provided evidence for the hypothesised interaction in a broadly distributed negativity, which we discuss in relation to the interference ERP literature. Our finding supports the proposal that memory retrieval and prediction are functionally the same. KW - Language KW - memory retrieval KW - interference KW - prediction KW - predictive KW - processing KW - interaction KW - ERP Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2026421 SN - 2327-3798 SN - 2327-3801 VL - 37 IS - 7 SP - 883 EP - 901 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Metzner, Paul A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Roesler, Frank T1 - The Importance of Reading Naturally: Evidence From Combined Recordings of Eye Movements and Electric Brain Potentials JF - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society KW - Reading KW - Sentence comprehension KW - ERP KW - Eye movements KW - Regressions Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12384 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 41 SP - 1232 EP - 1263 PB - Wiley CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Czerwon, Beate A1 - Hohlfeld, Annette A1 - Wiese, Heike A1 - Werheid, Katja T1 - Syntactic structural parallelisms influence processing of positive stimuli evidence from cross-modal ERP priming JF - International journal of psychophysiology N2 - Language can strongly influence the emotional state of the recipient. In contrast to the broad body of experimental and neuroscientific research on semantic information and prosodic speech, the emotional impact of grammatical structure has rarely been investigated. One reason for this might be, that measuring effects of syntactic structure involves the use of complex stimuli, for which the emotional impact of grammar is difficult to isolate. In the present experiment we examined the emotional impact of structural parallelisms, that is, repetitions of syntactic features, on the emotion-sensitive "late positive potential" (LPP) with a cross-modal priming paradigm. Primes were auditory presented nonsense sentences which included grammatical-syntactic parallelisms. Visual targets were positive, neutral, and negative faces, to be classified as emotional or non-emotional by the participants. Electrophysiology revealed diminished LPP amplitudes for positive faces following parallel primes. Thus, our findings suggest that grammatical structure creates an emotional context that facilitates processing of positive emotional information. KW - Language KW - Emotion KW - Priming KW - ERP KW - Late positive potential KW - Structural parallelisms Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2012.10.014 SN - 0167-8760 SN - 1872-7697 VL - 87 IS - 1 SP - 28 EP - 34 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Czypionka, Anna A1 - Spalek, Katharina A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Krifka, Manfred T1 - On the interplay of object animacy and verb type during sentence comprehension in German: ERP evidence from the processing of transitive dative and accusative constructions JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - Comprehension of transitive sentences relies on different kinds of information, like word order, case marking, and animacy contrasts between arguments. When no formal cues like case marking or number congruency are available, a contrast in animacy helps the parser to decide which argument is the grammatical subject and which the object. Processing costs are enhanced when neither formal cues nor animacy contrasts are available in a transitive sentence. We present an ERP study on the comprehension of grammatical transitive German sentences, manipulating animacy contrasts between subjects and objects as well as the verbal case marking pattern. Our study shows strong object animacy effects even in the absence of violations, and in addition suggests that this effect of object animacy is modulated by the verbal case marking pattern. KW - sentence comprehension KW - animacy KW - case marking KW - ERP KW - German Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2017-0031 SN - 0024-3949 SN - 1613-396X VL - 55 SP - 1383 EP - 1433 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hodapp, Alice A1 - Grimm, Sabine T1 - Neural signatures of temporal regularity and recurring patterns in random tonal sound sequences JF - European journal of neuroscience : EJN / European Neuroscience Association N2 - The auditory system is highly sensitive to recurring patterns in the acoustic input - even in otherwise unstructured material, such as white noise or random tonal sequences. Electroencephalography (EEG) research revealed a characteristic negative potential to periodically recurring auditory patterns - a response, which has been interpreted as memory trace-related and specific, rather than as a sign of periodicity-driven entrainment. Here, we aim to disentangle these two possible contributions by investigating the influence of a periodic sound sequence's inherent temporal regularity on event-related potentials. Participants were presented continuous sequences of short tones of random pitch, with some sequences containing a recurring pattern, and asked to indicate whether they heard a repetition. Patterns were either spaced equally across the random sequence (isochronous condition) or with a temporal jitter (jittered condition), which enabled us to differentiate between event-related potentials (and thus processing operations associated with a memory trace for a repeated pattern) and the periodic nature of the repetitions. A negative recurrence-related component could be observed independently of temporal regularity, was pattern-specific, and modulated by across trial repetition of the pattern. Critically, isochronous pattern repetition induced an additional early periodicity-related positive component, which started to build up already before the pattern onset and which was elicited undampedly even when the repeated pattern was occasionally not presented. This positive component likely reflects a sensory driven entrainment process that could be the foundation of a behavioural benefit in detecting temporally regular repetitions. KW - auditory sensory memory KW - entrainment KW - ERP KW - pattern detection KW - repetition Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.15123 SN - 0953-816X SN - 1460-9568 VL - 53 IS - 8 SP - 2740 EP - 2754 PB - Wiley CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Drenhaus, Heiner A1 - Zimmermann, Malte A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Exhaustiveness effects in clefts are not truth-functional JF - Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience N2 - While it is widely acknowledged in the formal semantic literature that both the truth-functional focus particle only and it-clefts convey exhaustiveness, the nature and source of exhaustiveness effects with it-clefts remain contested. We describe a questionnaire study (n = 80) and an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study (n = 16) that investigated the violation of exhaustiveness in German only-foci versus it-clefts. The offline study showed that a violation of exhaustivity with only is less acceptable than the violation with it-clefts, suggesting a difference in the nature of exhaustivity interpretation in the two environments. The ERP-results confirm that this difference can be seen in online processing as well: a violation of exhaustiveness in only-foci elicited a centro-posterior positivity (600-800ms), whereas a violation in it-clefts induced a globally distributed N400 pattern (400-600ms). The positivity can be interpreted as a reanalysis process and more generally as a process of context updating. The N400 effect in it-clefts is interpreted as indexing a cancelation process that is functionally distinct from the only case. The ERP study is, to our knowledge, the first evidence from an online experimental paradigm which shows that the violation of exhaustiveness involves different underlying processes in the two structural environments. KW - ERP KW - It- clefts KW - Only-foci KW - Information structure KW - German Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2010.10.004 SN - 0911-6044 VL - 24 IS - 3 SP - 320 EP - 337 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ventura-Bort, Carlos A1 - Wirkner, Janine A1 - Dolcos, Florin A1 - Wendt, Julia A1 - Hamm, Alfons O. A1 - Weymar, Mathias T1 - Enhanced spontaneous retrieval of cues from emotional events: an ERP study JF - Biological psychology N2 - Recent evidence points to enhanced episodic memory retrieval not only for emotional items but also for neutral information encoded in emotional contexts. However, prior research only tested instructed explicit recognition, and hence here we investigated whether memory retrieval is also heightened for cues from emotional contexts when retrieval is not explicitly probed. During the first session of a two-session experiment, neutral objects were presented on different background scenes varying in emotional and neutral contents. One week later, objects were presented again (with no background) intermixed with novel objects. In both sessions, participants were instructed to attentively watch the stimuli (free viewing procedure), and during the second session, ERPs were also collected to measure the ERP Old/New effect, an electrophysiological correlate of episodic memory retrieval. Analyses were performed using cluster-based permutation tests in order to identify reliable spatiotemporal ERP differences. Based on this approach, old relative to new objects, were associated with larger ERP positivity in an early (364-744 ms) and late time window (760-1148 ms) over distinct central electrode clusters. Interestingly, significant late ERP Old/New differences were only observed for objects previously encoded with emotional, but not neutral scenes (504 to 1144 ms). Because these ERP differences were observed in a non-instructed retrieval context, our results indicate that long-term, spontaneous retrieval for neutral objects, is particularly heightened if encoded within emotionally salient contextual information. These findings may assist in understanding mechanisms underlying spontaneous retrieval of emotional associates and the utility of ERPs to study maladaptive involuntary memories in trauma- and stress-related disorders. KW - Event-related potentials KW - ERP KW - Emotion KW - Retrieval KW - Spontaneous memory KW - Old/New effect Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2019.107742 SN - 0301-0511 SN - 1873-6246 VL - 148 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mai, Sandra A1 - Gramann, Klaus A1 - Herbert, Beate M. A1 - Friederich, Hans-Christoph A1 - Warschburger, Petra A1 - Pollatos, Olga T1 - Electrophysiological evidence for an attentional bias in processing body stimuli in bulimia nervosa JF - Biological psychology N2 - Empirical evidence suggests abnormalities in the processing of body stimuli in bulimia nervosa (BN). This study investigated central markers of processing body stimuli by means of event-related potentials in BN. EEG was recorded from 20 women with BN and 20 matched healthy controls while watching and evaluating underweight, normal and overweight female body pictures. Bulimics evaluated underweight bodies as less unpleasant and overweight bodies as bigger and more arousing. A higher P2 to overweight stimuli occurred in BN only. In contrast to controls, no N2 increase to underweight bodies was observed in BN. P3 was modulated by stimulus category only in healthy controls; late slow waves to underweight bodies were more pronounced in both groups. P2 amplitudes to overweight stimuli were correlated with drive for thinness and body dissatisfaction. We present novel support for altered perceptual and cognitive-affective processing of body images in BN on the subjective and electrophysiological level. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Bulimia nervosa KW - Body image KW - Body stimuli KW - ERP KW - P2 KW - Slow positive wave Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2015.03.013 SN - 0301-0511 SN - 1873-6246 VL - 108 SP - 105 EP - 114 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Passow, Susanne A1 - Westerhausen, Rene A1 - Hugdahl, Kenneth A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Heekeren, Hauke R. A1 - Lindenberger, Ulman A1 - Li, Shu-Chen T1 - Electrophysiological correlates of adult age differences in attentional control of auditory processing JF - Cerebral cortex N2 - In addition to sensory decline, age-related losses in auditory perception also reflect impairments in attentional modulation of perceptual saliency. Using an attention and intensity-modulated dichotic listening paradigm, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of processing conflicts between attentional focus and perceptual saliency in 25 younger and 26 older adults. Participants were instructed to attend to the right or left ear, and perceptual saliency was manipulated by varying the intensities of both ears. Attentional control demand was higher in conditions when attentional focus and perceptual saliency favored opposing ears than in conditions without such conflicts. Relative to younger adults, older adults modulated their attention less flexibly and were more influenced by perceptual saliency. Our results show, for the first time, that in younger adults a late negativity in the event-related potential (ERP) at fronto-central and parietal electrodes was sensitive to perceptual-attentional conflicts during auditory processing (N450 modulation effect). Crucially, the magnitude of the N450 modulation effect correlated positively with task performance. In line with lower attentional flexibility, the ERP waveforms of older adults showed absence of the late negativity and the modulation effect. This suggests that aging compromises the activation of the frontoparietal attentional network when processing the competing and conflicting auditory information. KW - aging KW - attention KW - auditory perception KW - conflict monitoring KW - ERP Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhs306 SN - 1047-3211 SN - 1460-2199 VL - 24 IS - 1 SP - 249 EP - 260 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Cary ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burmester, Juliane A1 - Spalek, Katharina A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell T1 - Context updating during sentence comprehension: The effect of aboutness topic JF - Brain & language : a journal of the neurobiology of language KW - Information structure KW - Discourse context KW - Aboutness topic KW - Sentence processing KW - Word order variation KW - ERP KW - Late positivity KW - Syntax-Discourse Model Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2014.08.001 SN - 0093-934X SN - 1090-2155 VL - 137 SP - 62 EP - 76 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Leminen, Alina A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Brain potentials to inflected adjectives: Beyond storage and decomposition JF - Brain research : an international multidisciplinary journal devoted to fundamental research in the brain sciences KW - Inflection KW - Morphology KW - Morpho-syntactic feature KW - Lexical-semantics KW - ERP KW - N400 Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2013.10.038 SN - 0006-8993 SN - 1872-6240 VL - 1543 SP - 223 EP - 234 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Budd, Mary-Jane A1 - Paulmann, Silke A1 - Barry, Christopher A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Brain potentials during language production in children and adults - an ERP study of the English past tense JF - Brain & language : a journal of the neurobiology of language N2 - The current study examines the neural correlates of 8-to-12-year-old children and adults producing inflected word forms, specifically regular vs. irregular past-tense forms in English, using a silent production paradigm. ERPs were time-locked to a visual cue for silent production of either a regular or irregular past-tense form or a 3rd person singular present tense form of a given verb (e.g., walked/sang vs. walks/sings). Subsequently, another visual stimulus cued participants for an overt vocalization of their response. ERP results for the adult group revealed a negativity 300-450 ms after the silent-production cue for regular compared to irregular past-tense forms. There was no difference in the present form condition. Children's brain potentials revealed developmental changes, with the older children demonstrating more adult-like ERP responses than the younger ones. We interpret the observed ERP responses as reflecting combinatorial processing involved in regular (but not irregular) past-tense formation. KW - ERP KW - Morphology KW - Production KW - Children KW - Past tense Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2012.12.010 SN - 0093-934X SN - 1090-2155 VL - 127 IS - 3 SP - 345 EP - 355 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Rösler, Frank T1 - Are words pre-activated probabilistically during sentence comprehension? BT - evidence from new data and a Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis using publicly available data JF - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience N2 - Several studies (e.g., Wicha et al., 2003b; DeLong et al., 2005) have shown that readers use information from the sentential context to predict nouns (or some of their features), and that predictability effects can be inferred from the EEG signal in determiners or adjectives appearing before the predicted noun. While these findings provide evidence for the pre-activation proposal, recent replication attempts together with inconsistencies in the results from the literature cast doubt on the robustness of this phenomenon. Our study presents the first attempt to use the effect of gender on predictability in German to study the pre-activation hypothesis, capitalizing on the fact that all German nouns have a gender and that their preceding determiners can show an unambiguous gender marking when the noun phrase has accusative case. Despite having a relatively large sample size (of 120 subjects), both our preregistered and exploratory analyses failed to yield conclusive evidence for or against an effect of pre-activation. The sign of the effect is, however, in the expected direction: the more unexpected the gender of the determiner, the larger the negativity. The recent, inconclusive replication attempts by Nieuwland et al. (2018) and others also show effects with signs in the expected direction. We conducted a Bayesian random-ef-fects meta-analysis using our data and the publicly available data from these recent replication attempts. Our meta-analysis shows a relatively clear but very small effect that is consistent with the pre-activation account and demonstrates a very important advantage of the Bayesian data analysis methodology: we can incrementally accumulate evidence to obtain increasingly precise estimates of the effect of interest. KW - ERP KW - pre-activation KW - predictions KW - grammatical gender KW - Bayesian meta-analysis Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107427 SN - 0028-3932 SN - 1873-3514 VL - 142 PB - Elsevier Science CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris A1 - Frossard, Jaromil A1 - Renaud, Olivier T1 - Accounting for stimulus and participant effects in event-related potential analyses to increase the replicability of studies JF - Journal of neuroscience methods N2 - Background: Event-related potentials (ERPs) are increasingly used in cognitive science. With their high temporal resolution, they offer a unique window into cognitive processes and their time course. In this paper, we focus on ERP experiments whose designs involve selecting participants and stimuli amongst many. Recently, Westfall et al. (2017) highlighted the drastic consequences of not considering stimuli as a random variable in fMRI studies with such designs. Most ERP studies in cognitive psychology suffer from the same drawback. New method: We advocate the use of the Quasi-F or Mixed-effects models instead of the classical ANOVA/by-participant F1 statistic to analyze ERP datasets in which the dependent variable is reduced to one measure per trial (e.g., mean amplitude). We combine Quasi-F statistic and cluster mass tests to analyze datasets with multiple measures per trial. Doing so allows us to treat stimulus as a random variable while correcting for multiple comparisons. Results: Simulations show that the use of Quasi-F statistics with cluster mass tests allows maintaining the family wise error rates close to the nominal alpha level of 0.05. Comparison with existing methods: Simulations reveal that the classical ANOVA/F1 approach has an alarming FWER, demonstrating the superiority of models that treat both participant and stimulus as random variables, like the Quasi-F approach. Conclusions: Our simulations question the validity of studies in which stimulus is not treated as a random variable. Failure to change the current standards feeds the replicability crisis. KW - Cluster mass KW - ERP KW - Quasi-F KW - Mixed-effects model KW - Replicability crisis KW - Stimulus as fixed-effect fallacy Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneumeth.2018.09.016 SN - 0165-0270 SN - 1872-678X VL - 309 SP - 218 EP - 227 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -