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Category: Project

Description: The aim of the project is to investigate belief attribution during linguistic communication. The first part investigated the effect of social presence and the spontaneous mentalization it perhaps elicits on language comprehension. We named objects correctly or incorrectly either in the presence of a confederate, or the participant being alone. The second part placed the emphasis on mentalization as attribution of false-beliefs during semantic processing. In this study participants watched the presentation of objects and heard congruent or incongruent labels in the presence of an Observer. By obstructing her visual access, the Observer sometimes had a false-belief about the identity of the presented object and consequently, heard an erroneous object label and experienced a violation of semantic expectations but participants did not. The question was whether this asymmetry is reflected in the brain activity of participants. Such a setting allowed to test the N400 effect in a social context with the involvement of belief attributions. Data was collected with EGI's 128 channel Hydrocel Geodesic Net EEG system.