Abstract
A hallmark of human thought is the ability to think about not just the actual world but also about alternative ways the world could be. One way to study this contrast is through language. Language has grammatical devices for expressing possibilities and necessities, such as the words might or must. With these devices, called “modal expressions,” we can study the actual versus possible contrast in a highly controlled way. While factual utterances such as “There is a monster under my bed” update the here-and-now of a discourse model, a modal version of this sentence, “There might be a monster under my bed,” displaces from the here-and-now and merely postulates a possibility. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to test whether the processes of discourse updating and modal displacement dissociate in the brain. Factual and modal utterances were embedded in short narratives, and across two experiments, factual expressions increased the measured activity over modal expressions. However, the localization of the increase appeared to depend on perspective: signal localizing in right temporoparietal areas increased when updating the representation of someone else’s beliefs, while frontal medial areas seem sensitive to updating one’s own beliefs. The presence of modal displacement did not elevate MEG signal strength in any of our analyses. In sum, this study identifies potential neural signatures of the process by which facts get added to our mental representation of the world.
Highlights
Speculating about possibilities employs our unique human capacity to displace from the here-and- (Hockett, 1959; Bickerton, 2008; Suddendorf et al, 2009).Received July 2, 2020; accepted October 29, 2020; First published December 7, 2020
The ANOVA revealed a significant effect of MODAL FORCE in the right intraparietal sulcus within our test window of 100–900 ms after the target verb’s onset (p = 0.046), where the factual condition elicited more activation than the modal conditions
We observed a similar effect in a temporal cluster in the right TPJ (rTPJ) around 240–275 ms, this effect only survived multiple comparisons correction across time, not across multiple region of interest (ROI)
Summary
Speculating about possibilities employs our unique human capacity to displace from the here-and- (Hockett, 1959; Bickerton, 2008; Suddendorf et al, 2009).Received July 2, 2020; accepted October 29, 2020; First published December 7, 2020. We can express possibility using “modal expressions” like “There might be a monster”, shifting our perspective from the immediate present to a hypothetical scenario. Other cognitive abilities that shift into alternative perspectives, Author contributions: M.T., R.L., A.C., and L.P. designed research; M.T. and R.L. performed research; M.T. analyzed data; M.T., R.L., A.C., and L.P. wrote the paper. We know surprisingly little about the neural mechanisms involved in modal displacement. While factual statements like “There is a monster” update our beliefs about a situation, modal utterances indicate uncertainty instead. Are the mental operations of discourse updating and modal displacement dissociable in the brain? We investigated the neural correlates of integrating factual and modal utterances into an existing discourse representation Are the mental operations of discourse updating and modal displacement dissociable in the brain? Here, we investigated the neural correlates of integrating factual and modal utterances into an existing discourse representation
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