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Publications (147)
Moral beauty, reflected in one’s actions, and facial beauty both affect how we’re judged. Here, we investigated how moral and facial beauty interactively affect social judgments and emotional responses, employing event-related brain potentials. Participants (all female) associated positive, neutral, or negative verbal information with faces scoring...
Facial expression perception in humans inherently relies on prior knowledge and contextual cues, contributing to efficient and flexible processing. For instance, multi-modal emotional context (such as voice color, affective text, body pose, etc.) can prompt people to perceive emotional expressions in objectively neutral faces. Drawing inspiration f...
When producing language in shared task settings, task partners have been shown to represent not only their own utterances, but also the utterances of their partners (Baus et al., 2014). Partner representations may entail an internal simulation of the partner’s speech, potentially affecting own lexical access and retrieval speed (e.g., Hoedemaker et...
Human communication is multi-modal; e.g., face-to-face interaction involves auditory signals (speech) and visual signals (face movements and hand gestures). Hence, it is essential to exploit multiple modalities when designing machine learning-based facial expression recognition systems. In addition, given the ever-growing quantities of video data t...
The biographies of some celebrated artists are marked by accounts that paint a far from beautiful portrait. Does this negative-social knowledge influence the aesthetic experience of an artwork? Does an artist’s fame protect their paintings from such an influence? We present two preregistered experiments examining the effect of social–emotional biog...
Emotionality likely is a key factor affecting our susceptibility to misinformation. However, the mechanisms underlying this observation are not well understood. Specifically, when people derive social information from person-related news, they rely predominantly on emotional content, apparently unperturbed by the credibility of the source. To help...
Linguistic categories can impact visual perception. For instance, learning that two objects have different names can enhance their discriminability. Previous studies have identified a typical pattern of categorical perception, characterized by faster discrimination of stimuli from different categories, a neural mismatch response during early visual...
The present EEG study with 32 healthy participants investigated whether affective knowledge about a person influences the visual awareness of their face, additionally considering the impact of facial appearance. Faces differing in perceived trustworthiness based on appearance were associated with negative or neutral social information and shown as...
High-quality AI-generated portraits (“deepfakes”) are becoming increasingly prevalent. Understanding the responses they evoke in perceivers is crucial in assessing their societal implications. Here we investigate the impact of the belief that depicted persons are real or deepfakes on psychological and neural measures of human face perception. Using...
Since the introduction of the Turing Test to measure machine intelligence, more and more sophisticated artificial systems have been developed to pass the test. These systems revealed some limitations of the Turing Test and new versions of the test have been developed over time in an attempt to overcome these shortcomings. Yet, all these variants st...
Does our perception of an object change once we discover what function it serves? We showed human participants ( n = 48, 31 females and 17 males) pictures of unfamiliar objects either together with keywords matching their function, leading to semantically informed perception, or together with non-matching keywords, resulting in uninformed perceptio...
Does our perception of an object change once we discover what function it serves? We showed human participants ( n = 48, 31 female, 17 male) pictures of unfamiliar objects either together with keywords matching their function, leading to semantically informed perception, or together with non-matching keywords, resulting in uninformed perception. We...
The human faculty to speak has evolved, so has been argued, for communicating with others and for engaging in social interactions. Hence the human cognitive system should be equipped to address the demands that social interaction places on the language production system. These demands include the need to coordinate speaking with listening, the need...
Some artists do terrible things. But does knowing something bad about an artist affect the way we perceive the work? Despite increased public interest, this question has yet to be addressed empirically. In this pre-registered study, we used aesthetic ratings and electrophysiological brain responses to shed light on the issue. We found that painting...
During communicative face-to-face interactions, emotional expressions are typically processed along with auditory speech. Although previous research has demonstrated the interaction between emotion and linguistic processes, so far no study has focused on the effect of the speaker’s emotional facial expression on natural language processing. In the...
We know little about the factors influencing which words we choose during lexical selection. In two experiments we investigated whether (re)activations of experiential traces of space have an impact on language production. Participants performed up- and downward head movements while listening to sentence fragments describing situations (e.g. ‘You a...
The role of meaning facets based on sensorimotor experiences is well-investigated in comprehension but has received little attention in language production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether experiential traces of space influenced lexical choices when participants completed visually-presented sentence fragments (e.g., ‘You are at...
We conducted a mega-analysis of six experiments conducted in our lab (Hauber et al., unpublished; Kuhlen & Abdel Rahman, 2017, 2021). The studies investigate cumulative semantic interference due to categorical relations, an increase in naming latencies participants typically show when continuously naming a series of semantically related pictures (e...
In popular narratives, minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCIs), which violate one category of our real-world knowledge (e.g. talking trees), are frequently embedded in emotional contexts. To assess the impact of emotion on MCI processing, we presented micro-narratives with negative or neutral contents before target sentences. We compared electro...
When naming a sequence of pictures of the same semantic category (e.g., furniture), response latencies systematically increase with each named category member. This cumulative semantic interference effect has become a popular tool to investigate the cognitive architecture of language production. However, not all processes underlying the effect itse...
Human visual perception is efficient, flexible and context-sensitive. The Bayesian brain view explains this with probabilistic perceptual inference integrating prior experience and knowledge through top-down influences. Advances in machine learning, such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), have enabled considerable progress in computer vision. Un...
For experimental research on language production, temporal precision and high quality of the recorded audio files are imperative. These requirements are a considerable challenge if language production is to be investigated online. However, online research has huge potential in terms of efficiency, ecological validity and diversity of study populati...
Numerous studies demonstrate that the production of words is delayed when speakers process in temporal proximity semantically related words. Yet the experimental settings underlying this effect are different from those under which we typically speak. This study demonstrates that semantic interference disappears, and can even turn into facilitation,...
In the present study, we employed event-related brain potentials to investigate the effects of semantic similarity on different planning stages during language production. We manipulated semantic similarity by controlling feature overlap within taxonomical hierarchies. In a blocked-cyclic naming task, participants named pictures in repeated cycles,...
The role of meaning facets based on sensorimotor experiences is well-investigated in comprehension but has received little attention in language production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether experiential traces of space influenced lexical choices when participants completed visually-presented sentence fragments (e.g., ‘You are at...
Language production experiments with overt articulation have thus far only scarcely been conducted online, mostly due to technical difficulties related to measuring voice onset latencies. Especially the poor audiovisual synchrony in web experiments (Bridges et al. 2020) is a challenge to time-locking stimuli and participants’ spoken responses. We t...
This study investigates partner-specific neural representations when preparing to address different task partners: a human, a Pepper robot, or a computer.
When listening to a speaker, we need to adapt to her individual speaking char- acteristics, such as error proneness, accent, etc. The present study investigated two aspects of adaptation to speaker identity during processing spoken sentences in multi-speaker situations: the effect of speaker sequence across sentences and the effect of learning spea...
The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point towards multiple representations, with activation of the compound’s constituent lemmas in...
Remedies to counter the impact of misinformation are in high demand, but little is known about the neuro-cognitive consequences of untrustworthy information and how they can be mitigated. In this preregistered study, we investigated the effects of social-emotional headline contents on social judgments and brain responses and whether they can be mod...
One of the ongoing debates about visual consciousness is whether it can be considered as an all-or-none or a graded phenomenon. While there is increasing evidence for the existence of graded states of conscious awareness based on paradigms such as visual masking, only little and mixed evidence is available for the attentional blink paradigm, specif...
Despite recent developments in integrating autonomous and human-like robots into many aspects of everyday life, social interactions with robots are still a challenge. Here, we focus on a central tool for social interaction: verbal communication. We assess the extent to which humans co-represent (simulate and predict) a robot’s verbal actions. Durin...
This study investigates in a joint action setting a well-established effect in speech production, cumulative semantic interference, an increase in naming latencies when naming a series of semantically related pictures. In a joint action setting, two task partners take turns naming pictures. Previous work in this setting has demonstrated that naming...
Our capacity to derive meaning from things that we see and words that we hear is unparalleled in other animal species and current AI systems. Despite a wealth of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies on where different semantic features are processed in the adult brain, the development of these systems in children is poorly understoo...
For experimental research on language production, temporal precision and high quality of the recorded audio-files are mandatory. These requirements are a considerable challenge if language production is to be investigated online. However, online research has a huge potential regarding efficiency, ecological validity and diversity of study-populatio...
Our capacity to derive meaning from things that we see and words that we hear is unparalleled in other animal species and current AI systems. Despite a wealth of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies on where different semantic features are processed in the adult brain, the development of these systems in children is poorly understoo...
When we refer to an object or concept by its name, activation of semantic and categorical information is necessary to retrieve the correct lexical representation. Whereas in neurotypical individuals it is well established that semantic context can interfere with or facilitate lexical retrieval, these effects are much less studied in people with les...
This study investigates the production of nominal compounds (Experiment 1) and simple nouns (Experiment 2) in a picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm to test models of morpho-lexical representation and processing. The continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) was registered and event-related brain potentials [ERPs] were analyzed in addition to pictu...
The diversified methodology and expertise of interdisciplinary research teams provide the opportunity to overcome the limited perspectives of individual disciplines. This is particularly true at the interface of Robotics, Neuroscience, and Psychology as the three fields have quite different perspectives and approaches to offer. Nonetheless, alignin...
In this preregistered study, we investigate whether themes conveyed by task partners’ narratives reveal semantic relationships between objects that would otherwise be perceived as unrelated. Such ad-hoc formation of thematic relations should result in semantic interference when naming objects related to the theme in a blocked-cyclic naming paradigm...
How domain-general cognitive control is engaged in language processing remains debated. We address how linguistic processes are monitored and regulated by analyzing the effects of previous-trial sentence correctness on the P600 component of the event-related potential (ERP) in the current-trial. In data from a previous experiment about processing s...
Language production experiments with overt articulation have thus far only scarcely been conducted online, mostly due to technical difficulties related to measuring voice onset latencies. Especially the poor audiovisual synchrony in web experiments (Bridges et al., 2020) is a challenge to time-locking stimuli and participants' spoken responses. We...
Natural use of language involves at least two individuals. Some studies have focused on the interaction between senders in communicative situations and how the knowledge about the speaker can bias language comprehension. However, the mere effect of a face as social context on language processing remains unknown. In the present study we used event-r...
One of the ongoing debates about visual consciousness is whether it can be considered as an all-or-none or a graded phenomenon. This may depend on the experimental paradigm and the task used to investigate this question. The present event-related potential study (N = 32) focuses on the attentional blink paradigm for which so far only little and mix...
When we refer to an object or concept by its name, activation of semantic and categorical information is necessary to retrieve the correct lexical representation. While in neurotypical participants it is well established that semantic context can interfere with or facilitate lexical retrieval, these effects are much less studied in people with lesi...
Robots are getting increasingly more present in many spheres of human life, making the need for robots that can successfully engage in natural social interactions with humans paramount. Successful human-robot interaction could be achieved more effectively if robots could act predictably and could predict the humans' actions. If robots could represe...
How does the credibility we attribute to media sources influence our opinions and judgments derived from news? Participants read headlines about the social behavior of depicted unfamiliar persons from websites of trusted or distrusted well-known German news media. As a consequence, persons paired with negative or positive headlines were judged more...
In the present study we show that people's social judgments rely to a large extent on the emotional content of information encountered, apparently unperturbed by its trustworthiness We investigated the potential underlying cognitive-emotional mechanisms reflected in pupil dilation during social judgments and the confidence with which social judgmen...
Does language change what we perceive? Does speaking different languages cause us to perceive things differently? We review the behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the influence of language on perception, with an emphasis on the visual modality. Effects of language on perception can be observed both in higher-level processes such as re...
Language production ultimately aims to convey meaning. Yet words differ widely in the richness and density of their semantic representations, and these differences impact conceptual and lexical processes during speech planning. Here, we replicated the recent finding that semantic richness, measured as the number of associated semantic features acco...
Numerous studies demonstrate that the production of words is delayed when speakers process in temporal proximity semantically related words. Yet the experimental settings underlying this effect are different from those under which we typically speak. This study demonstrates that semantic interference disappears, and can even turn into facilitation,...
This study investigates in a joint action setting a well-established effect in speech production, cumulative semantic interference, an increase in naming latencies when naming a series of semantically related pictures. In a joint action setting, two task partners take turns naming pictures. Previous work in this setting demonstrated that naming lat...
Previous research suggests that a task partner's speaking affects own language production. In single-subject settings, naming latencies for semantically related objects increase with each additional semantic category member (cumulative semantic interference effect, Howard et al., (2006). In dual-subject settings, in which two partners take turns na...
How we perceive and evaluate other persons depends on appearance-based impressions as well as top-down information such as knowledge about someone’s character. To date, little is known about how these two sources of information affect the conscious perception of faces, about their relative contributions and possible interactions. Here, we directly...
Does language “reach into” perception to change what we perceive? Does speak- ing different languages cause us to perceive things differently? We review the behavioral and electrophysiological evidence that visual perception is shaped by both long-term experience with language and its rapid involvement in-the- moment. These effects can be observed...
Semantic context modulates precision and speed of language production. Using different experimental designs including the Picture-Word-Interference (PWI) paradigm, it has consistently been shown that categorically related distractor words (e.g., cat) inhibit retrieval of the target picture name (dog). Here we introduce a novel variant of the PWI pa...
How does the credibility we attribute to media sources influence our opinions and judgments derived from news? Participants read headlines about the social behavior of depicted unfamiliar persons from websites of trusted or distrusted well-known German news media. As a consequence, persons paired with negative or positive headlines were judged more...
Zusammenfassung
Welche Wirkung hat soziale Ausgrenzung auf die Wahrnehmung des Gegenübers und wie kann dieser Effekt mithilfe experimenteller Methoden erfasst werden? Die Beantwortung dieser Frage kann Psychologen, Soziologen, aber auch Klinikern wertvolle Erkenntnisse für das Verständnis und den konkreten Umgang mit den betroffenen Menschen oder G...
When we imagine an object and when we actually see that object, similar brain regions become active. Yet, the time course of neurocognitive mechanisms that support imagery is still largely unknown. The current view holds that imagery does not share early perceptual mechanisms, but starts with high-level visual representations. However, evidence of...
Semantic context modulates precision and speed of language production. Using different experimental designs including the Picture-Word-Interference (PWI) paradigm, it has consistently been shown that categorically related distractor words (e.g., cat) inhibit retrieval of the target picture name (dog). Here we introduce a novel variant of the PWI pa...
Semantic processing in language production includes different meaning relations determining the selection of lexical representations that best express the intended message. Here, we discuss assumptions of the swinging lexical network proposal (SLN), proposed to account for effects of different semantic relations in a variety of experimental paradig...
It is becoming increasingly established that information from long-term memory can influence early perceptual processing, a finding that is in line with recent theoretical approaches to cognition such as the predictive coding framework. Notwithstanding, the impact of semantic knowledge on conscious perception and the temporal dynamics of such an in...
In the Stroop task color words are shown in various print colors. When print colors are named or classified with button presses, interference occurs if word meaning is color-incongruent and facilitation if it is congruent. Although the Stroop effects in vocal and manual task versions are similar, it is unclear whether the underlying mechanisms are...
With event-related potentials we examined how speaker identity affects the processing of speech errors. In two experiments with probe verification and sentence correctness judgement tasks, respectively, grammatical agreement violations and slips of the tongue were embedded in German sentences spoken in native or Chinese accent. Portraits of Europea...
With event-related potentials we examined how speaker identity affects the processing of speech errors. In two experiments with probe verification and sentence correctness judgement tasks, respectively, grammatical agreement violations and slips of the tongue were embedded in German sentences spoken in native or Chinese accent. Portraits of Europea...
Affective information about other people’s social behavior may prejudice social interactions and bias person judgments. The trustworthiness of person-related information, however, can vary considerably, as in the case of gossip, rumours, lies, or so-called “fake news”. Here, we investigated how spontaneous person-likability and explicit person judg...
Language is assumed to augment human cognition. But can language also affect basic mechanisms of perception, suggesting cognitive penetrability of perception? This idea is highly controversial: linguistic categorization may induce top-down effects on ongoing perceptual processing. Alternatively, such effects may not concern perception proper, but p...
Language production ultimately aims to convey meaning. Yet, words differ widely in the richness and density of their semantic representations and these differences impact conceptual and lexical processes during speech planning. Here, we replicate the recent finding that semantic richness, measured as the number of associated semantic features accor...
Affective information about other people’s social behavior may prejudice social interactions and bias person judgments. The trustworthiness of person-related information, however, can vary considerably, as in the case of gossip, rumors, lies, or “fake news.” Here, we investigated how spontaneous person likability and explicit person judgments are i...
This study investigated effects of healthy ageing and of non-verbal attentional control on speech production. Young and older speakers participated in a picture-word interference (PWI) task with compound targets. To increase the processing load, the two pictures of the compounds' constituents were presented side-by-side for spoken naming (e.g., a p...
The production of nominal compounds in the presence of morphological, semantic, and unrelated distractor words (picture-word interference paradigm) was investigated in young (M = 27 years) and older (M = 70.5 years) German speakers to test models of speech production and lexical representation. Constituent distractors of compound targets (lip or st...
The present study investigated how lexical selection is influenced by the number of semantically related representations (semantic neighbourhood density) and their similarity (semantic distance) to the target in a speeded picture-naming task. Semantic neighbourhood density and similarity as continuous variables were used to assess lexical selection...
Heterogeneous effects of semantic distance in language production have sparked a debate on the central assumption of many language production models, namely that lexical selection is a competitive process. In the present ERP study, we manipulated semantic distance in the picture word interference (PWI) paradigm systematically within taxonomic hiera...
Can our native language influence what we consciously perceive? While evidence accumulates that language modulates visual discrimination, little is known about the relation between language structure and consciousness. We employed EEG and the attentional blink paradigm in which targets are often unnoticed. Native Greek speakers (N=28), who distingu...
The ultimate goal of speaking is to convey meaning, and meaning may relate not only to categorical or associative semantics, but also to social and emotional aspects. However, while semantic effects are well-investigated, little is known about how emotional contents shape different planning stages during language production. In two experiments we i...