Prof. Stefan Heim | If so few are "many" – how many are "few"? The neurocogntion of quantifier processing

Guest Lecture

  • Date: Feb 14, 2019
  • Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Prof. Stefan Heim
  • Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, Medical School, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Wilhelm Wundt Room (A400)
The processing of quantifiers such as "many" or "few" is a complex

operation involving the estimation of the numerosities of objects, their

comparison to a reference amount, and semantic evaluation of that

comparison. This series of processing steps is supported by a

fronto-parietal network predominantly in the left hemisphere. The

criterion that defines a number of objects as e.g. "many" depends on the

context (many pandas vs. many ants) and on personal experience ("many

miles" for a long-distance runner vs. a person using crutches with a

broken leg). We found that this internal criterion can be modified in

the course of a learning paradigm in which healthy young subjects can be

trained to adapt their judgement of "many" from 60% to 40% of all

circles. Most interestingly, changing the criterion for the quantifier

"many" also leads to a change in the criterion for the untrained

quantifier "few", i.e. this change in meaning carries over to the

respective polar opposite. Next, we showed that the source of this

effect was located in Broca's region in the left inferior frontal

cortex, a region known to be relevant for semantic operations in other

paradigms. This finding was further corroborated in two experiments with

patients suffering from atrophy in the frontal cortex, who had

unreliable direct learning and failed to show any carry-over effects to

the untrained quantifier. In contrast, in patients with schizophrenia

who are notorious for their disordered thought, we did not observe any

difficulties in quantifier processing except for general slowing.

Poster
Go to Editor View