Kfederme

Welcome to Wikipedia

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! I noticed that you are interested in neuroscience, and it is always great to see new editors with academic backgrounds in the field. Please feel free to get in touch with me any time if you have any questions at all about editing here. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:53, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Neuroscience

Hello - and thank you for your contributions the the project. I've noticed a lot of similarity in the articles that appear to be created, and then quickly reviewed by you. May I ask - is article writing part of a project in a class you are teaching? (Feel free to reply just below here) Thanks.  7  23:49, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi. Yes, this was a class project (see entry 3.11 on the Wikipedia:School and university projects page). Wikipedia coverage of ERP components (used as dependent measures in cognitive psychology and neuroscience) was pretty slim and largely inaccurate ... and so this year instead of a paper, I had the graduate students work on this project.

Understood - thanks.  7  22:53, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

N400 and quantification/negation

Hello Dr. Federmeier,

Thanks very much for your contributions to this project (you and your students' work cleaning up coverage of ERP components has been phenomenal). I just had a quick question for you, if you don't mind, about this edit; might you be able to clarify what you mean by saying Urbach and Kutas (2010) shows that quantification and negation don't affect N4 amplitude in most cases? My understanding of the results of that study was that the quantifier or adverb did not reverse the lexico-semantic N400 affect but did at least reduce it.

Thanks, rʨanaɢ (talk) 00:16, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I think the most important point of the negation/quantifier work (especially for a general audience) is that the N400 is not a neural index of semantic plausibility, although its amplitude in other circumstances will often pattern with plausibility ratings. Indeed, Urbach and Kutas (2010) found amplitude modulations that reveal that some information about quantifiers can be used quickly. But there is still a striking dissociation with plausibility: whereas plausibility patterns as "most farmers grow crops" > "few farmers grow worms" > "most farmers grow worms" = "few farmers grow crops", the N400 (facilitation) pattern is "most farmers grow crops" > "few farmers grow crops" > "few farmers grow worms" = "most farmers grow worms". The fact that, for example, the latter two sentences are not actually different in N400 amplitude despite their different plausibility highlights the limits of ability of quantification to affect N400 amplitudes. I think the text therefore should let a novice who might be, say, designing a study with the N400 know that they should NOT expect sentences with quantification or negation to pattern with plausibility. But it is good to also let more sophisticated readers know that negation and quantification can have (more limited) effects ... so that was the intent of the edit. So I think it is not "We thought the N400 wasn't affected by negation or quantification but we were wrong" but rather "Strikingly, in the context of negation and quantification, N400 amplitudes will deviate from plausibility, although in careful designs one can see that it is not that the N400 is wholly insensitive to negation/quantification"

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