Neural evidence that utterance-processing entails mentalizing: The case of irony

Spotorno, Nicola; Koun, Éric; Prado, Jérôme; Henst, Jean-Baptiste Van der; Noveck, Ira

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.06.046

Cited by 227 publications

(124 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…This is in line with the results of several fMRI studies showing increased activation in vmPFC during pragmatic inference-making (Basnáková, Weber, Petersson, van Berkum, & Hagoort, 2013; Eviatar & Just, 2006; Rapp, Leube, Erb, Grodd, & Kircher, 2004; Spotorno, Koun, Prado, Van Der Henst, & Noveck, 2012). Unfortunately, the level of control or ceiling performance in Experiment 2 did not allow us to examine the neuroanatomic correlates of their performance when given choices.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Beyond words: Pragmatic inference in behavioral variant of frontotemporal degeneration

et al. 2015

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When the message of a speaker goes beyond the literal or logical meaning of the sentences used, a pragmatic inference is required to understand the complete meaning of an utterance. Here we study one example of pragmatic inference, called scalar implicature. Such an inference is required when a weaker term “some” is used in a sentence like “Some of the students passed the exam” because the speaker presumably had a reason not to use a stronger term like “all”. We investigated the comprehension of scalar implicatures in a group of 17 non-aphasic patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration (bvFTD) in order to test the contribution of non-linguistic decision-making ability and the role of prefrontal cortex in supporting the computation of pragmatic inferences. The results of two experiments point to a deficit in producing alternative interpretations beyond a logical reading. bvFTD patients thus prefer the narrowly literal or logical interpretation of a scalar term when they must generate a possible alternative interpretation by themselves, but patients prefer a pragmatic reading when offered a choice between the logical and the pragmatic interpretation of the same sentence. An imaging analysis links bvFTD patients’ spontaneous tendency toward a narrowly logical interpretation with atrophy in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Our findings are consistent with the pragmatic tolerance hypothesis, which proposes that difficulty generating alternative interpretations of an utterance, rather than a frank inability to compute an inference, affects the comprehension of a scalar term.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Beyond words: Pragmatic inference in behavioral variant of frontotemporal degeneration

et al. 2015

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“…The aim of this experiment is to confirm previous results (Spotorno et al, 2012) that show how a given expression takes longer to read when presented ironically as opposed to literally when decoys were deployed among the filler items. Given that Spotomo et al (2012) had included 10 ironies and 8 literal vignettes (ran domly selected), 6 decoys and 36 items from another experiment using vignettes of the same length, it is important to replicate our findings with more balanced materials.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 57%

When is irony effortful?

Spotorno¹,

Noveck²

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Whereas some studies indicate that ironic—as opposed to literal—readings of utterances take longer to process, others indicate that the 2 are processed at comparable speeds. We propose that mindreading processes are at least partly responsible for the mixed results, as we present 3 experiments that include stories having a target utterance with either an Ironic or Literal reading. Experiment 1 replicates earlier findings (Spotorno, Koun, Prado, Van Der Henst, & Noveck, 2012) showing that ironic readings take longer than literal ones when fillers include decoys, stories that call for an ironic remark but present a banal utterance instead and thus diffuse participants’ expectations for irony. Starting with Experiment 2, decoys are removed, leading to effects that are arguably revealing of Theory of Mind processes. One is an Early–Late effect, which occurs when ironic utterances are read as readily as literal ones in the 2nd half of an experimental session, creating “mixed” results in the laboratory. In Experiment 3, we further added antecedents before a critical event so that, later, the target utterance would be echoing an explicitly stated thought and would facilitate irony comprehension (Gibbs, 1986; Sperber & Wilson, 1981). Results reveal an Early–Late effect here, too. Further evidence of Theory of Mind activity follows from analyses of participants’ Social Skill subscale scores in the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001). Socially inclined participants are more likely than the socially disinclined to use a story’s negative event to portend the arrival of an irony; in contrast, socially disinclined participants appear more reactive than the socially inclined to explicit antecedents.

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“…Importantly, neural activity in this region was more accurately predicted by neural activity in the sensorycontent encoding clusters in the VOT than by the text message itself. These findings add to previous evidence that language-related brain areas are functionally connected to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) (Spotorno et al, 2012), and that the VOT is structurally connected to the mPFC via fibre bundles of the inferior fronto-occipito fasciculus (Yeatman et al, 2013).…”

Section: Neural Encoding Of Short Text Messages In the Visual Occipitsupporting

confidence: 78%

Social gating of sensory information during ongoing communication

et al. 2015

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Social context plays an important role in human communication. Depending on the nature of the source, the same communication signal might be processed in fundamentally different ways. However, the selective modulation (or "gating") of the flow of neural information during communication is not fully understood. Here, we use multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) and multivoxel connectivity analysis (MVCA), a novel technique that allows to analyse context-dependent changes of the strength interregional coupling between ensembles of voxels, to examine how the human brain differentially gates content-specific sensory information during ongoing perception of communication signals. In a simulated electronic communication experiment, participants received two alternative text messages during fMRI ("happy" or "sad") which they believed had been sent either by their real-life friend outside the scanner or by a computer. A region in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) selectively increased its functional coupling with sensory-content encoding regions in the visual cortex when a text message was perceived as being sent by the participant's friend, and decreased its functional coupling with these regions when a text message was perceived as being sent by the computer. Furthermore, the strength of neural encoding of content-specific information of text messages in the dmPFC was modulated by the social tie between the participant and her friend: the more of her spare time a participant reported to spend with her friend the stronger was the neural encoding. This suggests that the human brain selectively gates sensory information into the relevant network for processing the mental states of others, depending on the source of the communication signal.

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Neural evidence that utterance-processing entails mentalizing: The case of irony

Cited by 227 publications

References 44 publications

Beyond words: Pragmatic inference in behavioral variant of frontotemporal degeneration

Beyond words: Pragmatic inference in behavioral variant of frontotemporal degeneration

When is irony effortful?

Social gating of sensory information during ongoing communication

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