PhD Talks: Memory / Cognitive Neuroscience
Presentation 1: Task Complexity and the Efficacy of Spaced Retrieval Practice, Ewan Murray
Presentation 2: The Oscillatory Mechanisms Supporting the Processing of Lexically Ambiguous Words, Vanessa Keller
Language contains substantial ambiguity at several linguistic levels, including sound, structure, and meaning. One type of ambiguity that is ubiquitous in English concerns the meanings of individual words, whereby a single word form (e.g., bark) can refer to multiple distinct concepts. However, when we process language during conversation and when reading texts, we do not routinely struggle to disambiguate the words we encounter and are largely unaware of the alternative possible meanings for any given word, despite psycholinguistic evidence showing that we transiently activate all available meanings. While behavioural and event-related-potential studies have mapped out the time course of the activation of available meanings during the processing of ambiguous words, to date there has been no work investigating the oscillatory dynamics underpinning that process. I will present data from an EEG study that aimed to address this gap by looking at the role of neural oscillations in the comprehension of lexical-semantic ambiguity. Our pre-registered analyses focussed on theta oscillations (~3-8 Hz), which have been implicated in lexical-semantic processing during language comprehension and are generally regarded as a signature of lexical access. Beyond language processing, theta activity has also been linked to successful memory encoding. We used an experimental design that allowed us to disentangle these two purported roles of theta, investigating on the one hand the hypothesised involvement of theta oscillations in the processing of lexical-semantic ambiguity and on the other hand addressing the prediction that increased theta activity should be associated with better memory for linguistic input. I will discuss our findings in the context of previous work from the psycholinguistic and memory literatures and consider how they inform current theories of human language comprehension.
Presentation 3: The Neuromarkers of the Successful Startup Founders, Irena Danilovska
