Journal
PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY
Volume 59, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/psyp.13940
Keywords
attention; ERPs; language comprehension; meaning; N400
Funding
- NIA [AG026308]
- IES [R305A130448]
- James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award
- Marie Sklodowska--Curie Actions Program
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
- National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders
- National Institute of Mental Health
- National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This article discusses the core mechanism of human cognition, which is the ability to access information stored in long-term memory to respond to incoming sensory inputs. Through research findings, it is revealed that connecting and further understanding are the key steps in acquiring meaning, resulting in stable bindings in the brain to help humans perceive and understand the world.
The ability to rapidly and systematically access knowledge stored in long-term memory in response to incoming sensory information-that is, to derive meaning from the world-lies at the core of human cognition. Research using methods that can precisely track brain activity over time has begun to reveal the multiple cognitive and neural mechanisms that make this possible. In this article, I delineate how a process of connecting affords an effortless, continuous infusion of meaning into human perception. In a relatively invariant time window, uncovered through studies using the N400 component of the event-related potential, incoming sensory information naturally induces a graded landscape of activation across long-term semantic memory, creating what might be called proto-concepts. Connecting can be (but is not always) followed by a process of further considering those activations, wherein a set of more attentionally demanding active comprehension mechanisms mediate the selection, augmentation, and transformation of the initial semantic representations. The result is a limited set of more stable bindings that can be arranged in time or space, revised as needed, and brought to awareness. With this research, we are coming closer to understanding how the human brain is able to fluidly link sensation to experience, to appreciate language sequences and event structures, and, sometimes, to even predict what might be coming up next.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available