Establishing propositional truth-value in counterfactual and real-world contexts during sentence comprehension: differential sensitivity of the left and right inferior frontal gyri.

TLDR: The fMRI study investigated the neural circuits that are sensitive to the propositional truth-value of sentences about counterfactual worlds, aiming to reveal differential hemispheric sensitivity of the inferior prefrontal gyri tocounterfactual truth- Value and real-world truth- value.

About: This article is published in NeuroImage.The article was published on 2012-02-15 and is currently open access. It has received 32 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Counterfactual conditional & Counterfactual thinking.

Figures

Table 1 Example sentences and approximate translations with average truth-value rating and cloze value of the critical word for each condition. This table is adapted from Nieuwland and Martin (2011).

Table 2 Schematic representation of the regressors corresponding to the different sentence parts.

Table 3 Results from the Whole-brain analysis.

Fig. 1. (left graph) ROIs in the current study. Two 10-mm sphere centered at MNI coordinates [−44 29 12] (BA 45, top) and [−36 26–8] (BA 47, bottom) and their right hemisphere equivalents. (right graph) Effect of propositional truth-value in counterfactual sentences (dark gray bars, ‘CF’) and real-world sentences (light gray bars, ‘RW’) in four ROIs (left/ right, BA 45/47). Displayed are the false-minus-true difference score (and 95% confidence intervals) in average beta parameter value per sentence type and per ROI. (*pb .05).

Fig. 2. Effect of propositional truth-value in counterfactual sentences (A) and in real-world sentences (B). Pair-wise comparisons for false minus true sentences across all subjects (thresholded at P≤0.001 uncorrected). Labels are provided only for significant clusters (corrected for multiple comparisons with a cluster-level FDR P≤0.05). LIFG = Left inferior frontal gyrus. RIFG = Right inferior frontal gyrus. SFG = Superior frontal gyrus. MFG = Middle frontal gyrus. MTG = Middle temporal gyrus. IPL = Inferior parietal lobule.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "Establishing propositional truth-value in counterfactual and real-world contexts during sentence comprehension: differential sensitivity of the left and right inferior frontal gyri" ?

This paper investigated the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus for counterfactual reasoning about what is in fact false as if it were true.