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Crime Scene Investigation in the MRI scanner: Putting language and autism in context
Poster A4 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Jana Bašnáková1, Margot Mangnus1, Franziska Goltz1, Saskia B.J. Koch1, Peter Hagoort1, Ivan Toni1, Arjen Stolk1,2; 1Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 2Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
Everyday communication seems easy and effortless, but in fact requires inferences operating over multiple timescales and modalities. For instance, to interpret an utterance we often need to consider what has been said a second ago or on yesterday’s news, as well as check the presence of any co-occurring gestures or facial expressions. These context-dependent inferences might hold the key to understanding the difficulties individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) encounter in everyday social interactions (Wadge et al., 2019). However, research has largely focused on how people process carefully dissected experimental stimuli instead. Here we used combined fMRI/pupillometry to examine how people disambiguate utterances embedded within an unfolding communicative context, and whether and how such contextual inferences are altered in autistic individuals. Our approach is inspired by Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) and involves the dynamic analysis of unfolding chats between two potential criminals. Fifty adults with ASC and forty-two controls participated in this study, and read a total of 60 chat dialogs. In each dialog, their task was to judge whether the chat was sufficiently suspicious to be reported to the FBI or not. Importantly, half of the dialogs used ambiguous slang, such as “candy” for “drugs”. Understanding the context-specific use of these expressions necessitated inferences based on other information conveyed in the chat, such as information inconsistent with the literal reading of the slang word (mentioning “police” in a dialog about sweets). To isolate contextual inferences and control for linguistic properties of the items in each dialog, the implied meaning of the slang expressions was revealed beforehand in the other half of the dialogs. Presentation of these ‘Unknown’ and ‘Known’ dialogs was counterbalanced across participants. We focused analysis on sentences where information inconsistent with the unfolding communicative context was first mentioned and needed to be resolved. Pupil dynamics revealed an increase in pupil size time-locked to these critical sentences in Unknown relative to Known dialogs in both groups, a physiological validation of task efficacy. Preliminary fMRI findings revealed an interaction between dialog type (Known, Unknown) and group (ASC, controls): Activity in the left and right inferior frontal gyrus/frontal operculum, left fusiform, and inferior temporal gyrus showed similar responses across Known and Unknown dialogs in controls, and a weaker response in ASC participants when processing Known dialogs. These findings suggest that neurotypicals integrate semantic/pragmatic cues in the unfolding communicative context differently than participants with ASC. While both groups show physiological and fMRI markers of contextual integration when unexpected semantic/pragmatic cues are encountered during a dialog, participants with ASC do not routinely implement that contextual integration when a cue’s given meaning suffices. More generally, this study illustrates a novel naturalistic yet quantitative approach to capture and identify (altered) mechanisms of contextual integration evoked by utterances embedded within an unfolding communicative context.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Disorders: Developmental