Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States.
Department of Communication and Cognition, Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC), Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2020 Jun 25;10(1):10326. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-66814-z.
Predictability is known to modulate semantic processing in language, but it is unclear to what extent this applies for other modalities. Here we ask whether similar cognitive processes are at play in predicting upcoming events in a non-verbal visual narrative. Typically developing adults viewed comics sequences in which a target panel was highly predictable ("high cloze"), less predictable ("low cloze"), or incongruent with the preceding narrative context ("anomalous") during EEG recording. High and low predictable sequences were determined by a pretest where participants assessed "what happened next?", resulting in cloze probability scores for sequence outcomes comparable to those used to measure predictability in sentence processing. Through both factorial and correlational analyses, we show a significant modulation of neural responses by cloze such that N400 effects are diminished as a target panel in a comic sequence becomes more predictable. Predictability thus appears to play a similar role in non-verbal comprehension of sequential images as in language comprehension, providing further evidence for the domain generality of semantic processing in the brain.
可预测性已知会调节语言中的语义处理，但尚不清楚其在多大程度上适用于其他模态。在这里，我们想知道在预测非言语视觉叙事中即将发生的事件时，是否存在类似的认知过程。在脑电图记录期间，典型的发展中的成年人观看了漫画序列，其中目标面板具有高度可预测性（“高 cloze”）、可预测性较低（“低 cloze”）或与先前的叙事上下文不一致（“异常”）。高和低可预测序列是通过预测试确定的，参与者在预测试中评估“接下来会发生什么？”，从而为序列结果确定 cloze 概率得分，与用于测量句子处理中可预测性的 cloze 概率得分相当。通过因子分析和相关分析，我们表明 cloze 对神经反应有显著的调节作用，以至于当漫画序列中的目标面板变得更可预测时，N400 效应会减弱。因此，可预测性似乎在序列图像的非言语理解中发挥着与语言理解相似的作用，为大脑中语义处理的领域普遍性提供了进一步的证据。
