Abstract
The human brain processes language to optimise efficient communication. Studies have shown extensive evidence that the brain’s response to language is affected both by lower-level features, such as word-length and frequency, and syntactic and semantic violations within sentences. However, our understanding on cognitive processes at discourse level remains limited: How does the relationship between words and the wider topic one is reading about affect language processing? We propose an information theoretic model to explain cognitive resourcing. In a study in which participants read sentences from Wikipedia entries, we show information gain, an information theoretic measure that quantifies the specificity of a word given its topic context, modulates word-synchronised brain activity in the EEG. Words with high information gain amplified a slow positive shift in the event related potential. To show that the effect persists for individual and unseen brain responses, we furthermore show that a classifier trained on EEG data can successfully predict information gain from previously unseen EEG. The findings suggest that biological information processing seeks to maximise performance subject to constraints on information capacity.
Highlights
The human brain processes language to optimise efficient communication
In addition to information gain, the Early Positive Shift (EPS) was substantially affected by Word length, β = 0.064, and Word log-frequency, β = 0.072 but not Word class or Document preference, βs < 0.012
We set out to study whether information gain, a measure based on the efficient coding theory[19,20], could explain brain activity occurring during natural reading
Summary
Studies have shown extensive evidence that the brain’s response to language is affected both by lower-level features, such as word-length and frequency, and syntactic and semantic violations within sentences. In order to efficiently gain topical meaning, we need to allocate our cognitive resources strategically towards those words that carry specific information. Most experiments that have aimed towards natural language stimuli presented participants with words or sentences with little or no context; at best using individual sentences, words and their immediate context, such as words in a sentence around the stimuli word[14] These studies have revealed N400 effects for word surprisal in a word sequence[15] as well as amplified event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to general lexical statistics, such as frequency and word length[16,17]. Research[18] presented paragraphs of instructive text to participants, either with title, or without a title, the latter causing strong difficulty in comprehension
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