English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Never say no… How the brain interprets the pregnant pause in conversation.

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons49585

Bögels,  Sara
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
INTERACT, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons4391

Kendrick,  Kobin H.
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons116

Levinson,  Stephen C.
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, External Organizations;
INTERACT, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

Data availability
(Supplementary material)

Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

journal.pone.0145474.pdf
(Publisher version), 2MB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Bögels, S., Kendrick, K. H., & Levinson, S. C. (2015). Never say no… How the brain interprets the pregnant pause in conversation. PLoS One, 10(12): e0145474. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145474.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0029-2FAE-E
Abstract
In conversation, negative responses to invitations, requests, offers, and the like are more likely to occur with a delay – conversation analysts talk of them as dispreferred. Here we examine the contrastive cognitive load ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses make, either when relatively fast (300 ms after question offset) or delayed (1000 ms). Participants heard short dialogues contrasting in speed and valence of response while having their EEG recorded. We found that a fast ‘no’ evokes an N400-effect relative to a fast ‘yes’; however this contrast disappeared in the delayed responses. 'No' responses however elicited a late frontal positivity both if they were fast and if they were delayed. We interpret these results as follows: a fast ‘no’ evoked an N400 because an immediate response is expected to be positive – this effect disappears as the response time lengthens because now in ordinary conversation the probability of a ‘no’ has increased. However, regardless of the latency of response, a ‘no’ response is associated with a late positivity, since a negative response is always dispreferred. Together these results show that negative responses to social actions exact a higher cognitive load, but especially when least expected, in immediate response.