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Introduction
Publications
Publications (283)
Task-evoked pupil dilation has been linked to many cognitive variables, perhaps most notably unexpected events. Zenon (2019) proposed a unifying framework stating that pupil dilation related to cognition should be considered from an information-theory perspective. In the current study, we investigated whether the pupil's response to decision outcom...
Intrinsic motivational drives, like the autonomous feeling of control, and extrinsic motivational drives, like monetary reward, can benefit learning. Extensive research has focused on neurobiological and psychological factors that affect these drives, but our understanding of the sociocultural factors is limited. Here, we compared the effects of au...
Persons with and without autism process sensory information differently. Differences in sensory processing are directly relevant to social functioning and communicative abilities, which are known to be hampered in persons with autism. We collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 25 autistic individuals and 25 neurotypical ind...
When learners acquire new words in a second language (L2), their lexical representations and links are initially imprecise. As new, similar words are learned, these representations must become more specific to avoid errors. This study investigated whether contrasting similar words triggers this sharpening process and facilitates learning. In a mult...
Many daily choices are based on one's own knowledge. However, when predicting other people's behavior, we need to consider the differences between our knowledge and other people's presumed knowledge. Social agents need a mechanism to use privileged information for their own behavior but exclude it from predictions of others. Using fMRI, we investig...
In human communication, social intentions and meaning are often revealed in the way we move. In this study, we investigate the flexibility of human communication in terms of kinematic modulation in a clinical population, namely, autistic individuals. The aim of this study was twofold: to assess (a) whether communicatively relevant kinematic feature...
This study considers one of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of second language (L2) vocabulary in children: The differentiation and sharpening of lexical representations. We propose that sharpening is triggered by an implicit comparison of similar representations, a process we call contrasting. We investigate whether integrating...
Most theoretical accounts of autism posit difficulties in predicting others’ actions, and this difficulty has been proposed to be at the root of autistic individuals’ social communication differences. Empirical results are mixed, however, with autistic individuals showing reduced action prediction in some studies but not in others. It has recently...
In human communication, social intentions and meaning are often revealed in the way we move. In this study, we investigate the flexibility of human communication in terms of kinematic modulation in a clinical population, namely, autistic individuals. The aim of this study was twofold: to assess 1) whether communicatively relevant kinematic features...
Cognitive neuroscience has gained significant insight into the mechanisms underlying the mental lexicon and their impact on second language vocabulary learning. However, relatively little effort has been put into understanding how these mechanisms may impact instructional practices. We attempt to bridge this gap. Towards that end, we first describe...
Successful social interaction requires humans to predict others’ behavior. To do so, internal models of others are generated based on previous observations. When predicting others’ preferences for objects, for example, observations are made at an individual level (5-year old Rosie often chooses a pencil), or at a group level (kids often choose penc...
Humans are unique in their ability to communicate information through representational gestures which visually simulate an action (eg. moving hands as if opening a jar). Previous research indicates that the intention to communicate modulates the kinematics (e.g., velocity, size) of such gestures. If and how this modulation influences addressees’ co...
Children who are more proficient in cooperation with peers tend to be more preferred. To date, the development of peer cooperation has been studied mainly in two research traditions, one focusing on action coordination and the other focusing on interaction quality. Both aspects of cooperation are relevant for children's peer relations, but it is un...
Many studies demonstrated interactions between number processing and either spatial codes (effects of spatial-numerical associations) or visual size-related codes (size-congruity effect). However, the interrelatedness of these two number couplings is still unclear. The present study examines the simultaneous occurrence of space- and size-numerical...
Social interaction requires us to recognize subtle cues in behavior, such as kinematic differences in actions and gestures produced with different social intentions. Neuroscientific studies indicate that the putative mirror neuron system (pMNS) in the premotor cortex and mentalizing system (MS) in the medial prefrontal cortex support inferences abo...
Visual search often requires combining information on distinct visual features such as color and orientation, but how the visual system does this is not fully understood. To better understand this, we showed observers a brief preview of part of a search stimulus—either its color or orientation—before they performed a conjunction search task. Our ex...
We investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying turn-taking joint action in 42-month-old children (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) using a behavioral task of dressing a virtual bear together. We aimed to investigate how participants represent a partners’ behavior, i.e., in terms of specific action kinematics or of action effects. The be...
Humans generate internal models of their environment to predict events in the world. As the environments change, our brains adjust to these changes by updating their internal models. Here, we investigated whether and how 9-month-old infants differentially update their models to represent a dynamic environment. Infants observed a predictable sequenc...
From early on in life, children are able to use information from their environment to form predictions about events. For instance, they can use statistical information about a population to predict the sample drawn from that population and infer an agent’s preferences from systematic violations of random sampling. We investigated whether and how yo...
Humans are unique in their ability to communicate information through representational gestures which visually simulate an action (eg. moving hands as if opening a jar). Previous research indicates that the intention to communicate modulates the kinematics (e.g., velocity, size) of such gestures. If and how this modulation influences addressees' co...
Unexpected events provide us with opportunities for learning about what to expect from the world around us. Using a saccadic-planning paradigm, we investigated whether and how infants and adults represent the statistics of a changing environment (i.e. build an internal model of the environment). Participants observed differently colored bees that a...
Actions are important. We need to know how to do all sorts of actions in our everyday lives, like using a fork to eat and using a pen to write. We have an easier time understanding the actions we see other people do if we have done the same actions before ourselves. It helps us understand why other people choose to use the same action. Adults know...
When seeing people perform actions, we are able to quickly predict the action’s outcomes. These predictions are not solely based on the observed actions themselves but utilize our prior knowledge of others. It has been suggested that observed outcomes that are not in line with these predictions result in prediction errors, which require additional...
Recent research has suggested that all types of size-related information are linked by a generalised system that codes for domain-independent magnitudes. This generalized system is further suggested to be acquired through everyday sensorimotor experiences with contingencies of size-related information in the real world. The aim of the present study...
Social interaction requires us to recognize subtle cues in behavior, such as kinematic differences in actions and gestures produced with different social intentions. Neuroscientific studies indicate that the putative mirror neuron system (pMNS) in the premotor cortex and mentalizing system (MS) in the medial prefrontal cortex support inferences abo...
From early on in life, children are able to use information from their environment to form predictions about events. For instance, they can use statistical information about a population to predict the sample drawn from that population and infer an agent's preferences from systematic violations of random sampling. We investigated how young children...
Actions may be used to directly act on the world around us, or as a means of communication. Effective communication requires the addressee to recognize the act as being communicative. Humans are sensitive to ostensive communicative cues, such as direct eye gaze (Csibra & Gergely, 2009). However, there may be additional cues present in the action or...
Background
Several studies have reported action prediction difficulties in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Although action prediction develops in infancy, little is known about prediction abilities in infants at risk for ASD.
Methods
Using eye tracking, we measured action anticipations in 52 10-month-old infants at high and low familial risk for...
Table S1. Results from the one‐sample t‐tests assessing significant changes in HbO2 and HHb with respect to baseline in the low‐risk and high‐risk infant group.
Appendix S1. Analysis of group and conditional differences in stimulus attention.
During decision making, individuals are prone to rely on external cues such as expert advice when the outcome is not known. However, the electrophysiological correlates associated with outcome uncertainty and the use of expert advice are not completely understood. The feedback-related negativity (FRN), P3a, and P3b are event-related brain potential...
Evidence is accumulating that our brains process incoming information using top-down predictions. If lower level representations are correctly predicted by higher level representations, this enhances processing. However, if they are incorrectly predicted, additional processing is required at higher levels to "explain away" prediction errors. Here,...
The social and communicative difficulties that characterize Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are considered the most striking feature of the disorder. Research has reported that individuals with ASD show abnormalities in the brain regions associated with the processing of social information. Importantly, a recent study using functional near-infrared...
The functional contribution of the lateral prefrontal cortex to behavior has been discussed with reference to several higher-order cognitive domains. In a separate line of research, recent studies have focused on the anatomical organization of this part of the brain. However, these different approaches are rarely combined. Here, we combine previous...
Human communication is intrinsically multimodal. People convey meaning through speech, and non-linguistic means, such as facial signals, bodily displays and gestures. Various corpora are drawn and analyzed in order to understand how people act with their hands for communicative purposes. Generally, multimodality researchers recur to manual annotati...
Action perception and execution are linked in the human motor system, and researchers have proposed that this action-observation matching system underlies our ability to predict observed behavior. If the motor system is indeed involved in the generation of action predictions, activation should be modulated by the degree of predictability of an obse...
Mimicry of others' postures and behaviours forms an implicit yet indispensable component of social interactions. However, whereas numerous behavioural studies have investigated the occurrence of mimicry and its social sensitivity, the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remain elusive. In this study, single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation...
The current study investigates an interaction between numbers and physical size (i.e. size congruity) in visual search. In three experiments, participants had to detect a physically large (or small) target item amongst physically small (or large) distractors in a search task comprising single- digit numbers. The relative numerical size of the digit...
Prior knowledge affects how we perceive the world and the sensorimotor system actively guides our perception. An ongoing dispute regards the extent to which prior motor knowledge versus conceptual knowledge modulates the observation of others’ actions. Research indicates that motor experience increases motor activation during action perception. Oth...
It has been argued that the association of numbers and vertical space plays a
fundamental role for the understanding of numerical concepts. However, convincing
evidence for an association of numbers and vertical bimanual responses is still lacking.
The present study tests the vertical Spatio-Numerical-Association-of-Response-Codes
(SNARC) effect in...
Whether we hand over objects to someone, play a team sport, or make music together, social interaction often involves interpersonal action coordination, both during instances of cooperation and entrainment. Neural mirroring is thought to play a crucial role in processing other’s actions and is therefore considered important for social interaction....
Children’s joint action and advance planning skills are both undergoing development during the preschool years, but little is known about how joint action contexts influence children’s advance planning. In the first experiment, three-year-olds (N = 32) were better at planning ahead for a task in an individual compared to a joint condition when play...
In this chapter, we focus on psychological and brain perspectives on the experience of coincidence. We first introduce the topic of the experience of coincidence in general. In the second section, we outline several psychological mechanisms that underlie the experience of coincidence in humans, such as cognitive biases, the role of context and the...
Many theoretical and empirical contributions to the Predictive Processing account emphasize the important role of precision modulation of prediction errors. Recently it has been proposed that the causal models used in human predictive processing are best formally modeled by categorical probability distributions. Crucially, such distributions assume...
Several theories have been proposed to account for the medial frontal activity that is elicited during the evaluation of outcomes.
Respectively, these theories claim that the medial frontal response reflects (i) the absolute deviation between the value
of an outcome and its expected value (i.e. an absolute prediction error); (ii) the deviation betw...
Predicting others' actions is essential for well-coordinated social interactions. In two experiments including an infant population, this study addresses to what extent motor experience of an observer determines prediction accuracy for others' actions. Results show that infants who were proficient crawlers but inexperienced walkers predicted crawli...
Recognizing similarity between one's own and others' actions is important for identifying others with whom to affiliate and from whom to learn. In this study, 40 19-month-old toddlers recognized when a puppet chose the same toys as them. Toddlers preferred to affiliate with a puppet who chose the same toys as themselves relative to a puppet who cho...
In daily life, complex events are perceived in a causal manner, suggesting that the brain relies on predictive processes to
model them. Within predictive coding theory, oscillatory beta-band activity has been linked to top-down predictive signals
and gamma-band activity to bottom-up prediction-errors. However, neurocognitive evidence for predictive...
The current study investigates the effectiveness of learning words while displaying meaning congruent animations. We explore whether learning words with animation is sensitive to properties known to influence action understanding. We apply an embodied cognition framework and predictions from a recent theory about language and action (Action-Based L...
This article reviews recent literature on the role of top-down feedback processes in semantic representations in the brain. Empirical studies on perception and theoretical models of semantic cognition show that sensory input is filtered and interpreted based on predictions from higher order cognitive areas. Here, we review the present evidence to t...
The aim of this review is to consider how current vocabulary training methods could be optimized by considering recent scientific insights in how the brain represents conceptual knowledge. We outline the findings from several methods of vocabulary training. In each case, we consider how taking an embodied cognition perspective could impact word lea...
In a world full of objects, predicting which object a person is going to grasp is not easy for an onlooker. Among other cues, the characteristics of a reaching movement might be informative for predicting its target, as approach movements are slower when more accuracy is required. The current study examined whether observers can predict the target...
Cooperation with peers is challenging for young children, and there are large individual differences in the development of cooperation. The roles of child characteristics and peer experiences for peer interaction during free play have been studied extensively, but it is unclear which factors predict young children's successful cooperation at differ...
According to Kalisch et al., adopting a cognitive positive appraisal style promotes internal bodily homeostasis and acts as a safeguard against the detrimental effects of stress. Here we will discuss results from recent noninvasive brain stimulation studies in humans to illustrate that homeostatic plasticity provides a neural mechanistic account fo...
Previous research demonstrates that from early in life, our cortical sensorimotor areas are activated both when performing and when observing actions (mirroring). Recent findings suggest that the adult motor system is also involved in detecting others' rule violations. Yet, how this translates to everyday action errors (e.g., accidentally dropping...
From early in life, young children eagerly engage in social interactions. Yet, they still have difficulties in performing well-coordinated joint actions with others. Adult literature suggests that two processes are important for smooth joint action coordination: action prediction and inhibitory control. The aim of the current study was to disentang...
During social interaction, the behavior of interacting partners becomes coordinated. Although interpersonal coordination is well-studied in adults, relatively little is known about its development. In this project we explored how 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children spontaneously coordinated their drumming with a peer. Results showed that all children a...
Several studies investigating the development of approximate number representations used the number- to-position task and reported evidence for a shift from a logarithmic to a linear representation of numerical magnitude with increasing age. However, this interpretation as well as the number-to-position method itself has been questioned recently. T...
The role of motor experience in the processing of perceived actions is hotly debated on both behavioral (e.g., action understanding) and neural (e.g., activation of the motor system) levels of interpretation. Whereas some researchers focus on the role of motor experience in the understanding of and motor activity associated with perceived actions,...
According to embodied theories of language (ETLs), word meaning relies on sensorimotor brain areas, generally dedicated to acting and perceiving in the real world. More specifically, words denoting actions are postulated to make use of neural motor areas, while words denoting visual properties draw on the resources of visual brain areas. Therefore,...
From early in life, infants watch other people's actions. How do young infants come to make sense of actions they observe? Here, we review empirical findings on the development of action understanding in infancy. Based on this review, we argue that active action experience is crucial for infants' developing action understanding. When infants execut...
A dominant hypothesis on how the brain processes numerical size proposes a spatial representation of numbers as positions on a 'mental number line'. An alternative hypothesis considers numbers as elements of a generalized representation of sensorimotor-related magnitude which is not obligatorily spatial. Here we show that individuals' relative use...
The associative account described in the target article provides a viable explanation for the origin of mirror neurons. We argue here that if mirror neurons develop purely by associative learning, then they cannot by themselves explain intentional action understanding. Higher-level processes seem to be involved in the formation of associations as w...
Recent accounts of understanding goal-directed action underline the importance of a hierarchical predictive architecture.
However, the neural implementation of such an architecture remains elusive. In the present study, we used functional neuroimaging
to quantify brain activity associated with predicting physical movements, as they were modulated b...
Abstract Recent research on spatial number representations suggest that the number space is not necessarily horizontally organized and might also be affected by acquired associations between magnitude and sensory experiences in vertical space. Evidence for this claim is however controversial. The present study now aims to compare vertical and horiz...