Oddballs and the Unexpected

There are many ways to see what the brain is doing during a task. One of the most common techniques is called electroencephalography (EEG), which measures the electrical impulses of the brain collected using electrodes on the scalp. Brain researchers have come to recognize that there are certain brainwaves that characterize responses to a specific class of stimuli. The brainwave that I want to talk about is called the N400.

The N400 appears when a person is presented with a semantically unfitting or 'oddball' (yes, that is a scientific term) sentence. For example, "I spread my toast with jam and socks."

Recently, researchers have been arguing about whether or not people integrate context information when processing the meaning of sentences. By arguing, I mean passionately writing papers and designing definitive experiments.

So this Dutch scientist, van Burken, thought "Well, if conext information IS integrated in language processing, the 'oddball' effect (the N400) should happen when a perfectly acceptable sentence is presented in an inappropriate context." So he presented the same sentence ("I would like a glass of wine.") twice; once in an adult voice, and once in a childs voice. Sure enough, viewers showed an N400 response to an entirely acceptable sentence in an inappropriate context!

I love elegantly designed experiments like this one because even though we intuitively understand something (like that context is a factor when we are interpreting meaning), conclusive scientific evidence for it can difficult to come by.