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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Dr Heather J FergusonLecturer in Psychology |
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Research interests
My primary research interest is in Cognitive Psychology. I am particularly interested in the interface between cognitive processes and social interaction, specifically the way that we access and represent other people's perspectives during communication. I use a variety of techniques, including eye-movements, event-related brain potentials and reaction times to look at questions, such as:
- How do adults understand and predict events in terms of other people's mental states (e.g. their intentions, beliefs and desires)? And how quickly can they do this?
- What happens when these intentions, beliefs or desires are at odds with our own knowledge of the world?
- What makes this sort of thinking ‘special’ compared to thinking about more concrete, factual events? And are there gender differences in these abilities?
- How do we separate reality from fantasy (say, in a fictional novel), and why do they get muddled up sometimes?
- What factors makes ‘negated’ sentences easier or harder to understand?
Key publications
Ferguson, H.J (2012). Eyemovements reveal rapid concurrent access to factual and counterfactual interpretations of the world. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65 (5), 939-961.
Ferguson, H.J., & Breheny, R. (2012). Listeners' eyes reveal spontaneous sensitivity to others' perspectives. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 257-263.
Ferguson, H.J., & Breheny, R. (2011). Eye movements reveal the time-course of anticipating behaviour based on complex, conflicting desires. Cognition, 119, 179-196.
Ferguson, H.J., & Sanford, A.J. (2008). Anomalies in real and counterfactual worlds: An eye-movement investigation. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 609-626.
Also view these in the Kent Academic Repository
Articles
Ferguson, Heather J. and Breheny, Richard (2012)
Listeners' eyes reveal spontaneous sensitivity to others' perspectives.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48. pp. 257-263. ISSN 0022-1031.
Abstract
During everyday social interactions, we typically anticipate (or explain) others behaviour according to their current mental states (e.g. their knowledge, beliefs and intentions). To date, very little is known about the time-course with which such perspective information influences communication. We report a novel interactive visual world study examining these processes. Here, two communicators watched videos depicting transfer events and subsequently described these events to each other. Critically, on half the trials a screen blocked the speakers (but not the listeners) view part-way through the video, establishing a discrepancy in the knowledge held by the two communicators. Eye-tracking analyses showed that listeners were rapidly sensitive to their partners perspective, as evidenced by a significantly reduced reality-bias when speakers held out-of-date knowledge about a privileged transfer event. However, we also found that under these conditions, listeners suffered ongoing interference from their own knowledge of reality, which inhibited successful anticipation of the speakers intended referents.
Ferguson, Heather J. (2012)
Eye movements reveal rapid concurrent access to factual and counterfactual interpretations of the world.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65 (5). pp. 939-961. ISSN 1747-0218.
Abstract
Imagining a counterfactual world using conditionals (e.g., If Joanne had remembered her umbrella . . .) is common in everyday language. However, such utterances are likely to involve fairly complex reasoning processes to represent both the explicit hypothetical conjecture and its implied factual meaning. Online research into these mechanisms has so far been limited. The present paper describes two eye movement studies that investigated the time-course with which comprehenders can set up and access factual inferences based on a realistic counterfactual context. Adult participants were eye-tracked while they read short narratives, in which a context sentence set up a counterfactual world (If . . . then . . .), and a subsequent critical sentence described an event that was either consistent or inconsistent with the implied
factual world. A factual consistent condition (Because . . . then . . .) was included as a baseline of normal contextual integration. Results showed that within a counterfactual scenario, readers quickly inferred the implied factual meaning of the discourse. However, initial processing of the critical word led to clear, but distinct, anomaly detection responses for both contextually inconsistent and consistent conditions. These results provide evidence that readers can rapidly make a factual inference from a preceding counterfactual context, despite maintaining access to both counterfactual and factual interpretations of events.
Breheny, Richard and Ferguson, Heather J. and Katsos, Napoleon (2012)
Investigating the timecourse of accessing conversational implicatures during incremental sentence interpretation.
Language and Cognitive Processes. ISSN 0169-0965. (in press)
Abstract
Many contextual inferences in utterance interpretation are explained as following from the nature of conversation and the assumption that participants are rational. Recent psycholinguistic research has focussed on certain of these Gricean inferences and have revealed that comprehenders can access them in online interpretation. However there have been mixed results as to the time-course of access. Some results show that Gricean inferences can be accessed very rapidly, as rapidly as any other contextually specified information (Sedivy, 2003; Grodner, Klein, Carbery, & Tanenhaus, 2010); while other studies looking at the same kind of inference suggest that access to Gricean inferences are delayed relative to other aspects of semantic interpretation (Huang & Snedeker, 2009; in press). While previous timecourse research has focussed on Gricean inferences that support the online assignment of reference to definite expressions, the study reported here examines the timecourse of access to scalar implicatures, which enrich the meaning of an utterance beyond the semantic interpretation. Even if access to Gricean inference in support of reference assignment may be rapid, it is still unknown whether genuinely enriching scalar implicatures are delayed. Our results indicate that scalar implicatures are accessed as rapidly as other contextual inferences. The implications of our results are discussed in reference to the architecture of language comprehension.
Callan, Mitch J. and Ferguson, Heather J. and Bindemann, Markus (2012)
Eye movements to audio-visual scenes reveal expectations of a just world.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. (in press)
Abstract
When confronted with bad things happening to good people, observers often engage reactive strategies, such as victim derogation, to maintain a belief in a just world. Although such reasoning is usually made retrospectively, we investigated the extent to which knowledge of another persons good or bad behavior can also bias peoples online expectations for subsequent good or bad outcomes. Using a fully-crossed design, participants listened to auditory scenarios that varied in terms of whether the characters engaged in morally good or bad behavior while their eye movements were tracked around concurrent visual scenes depicting good and bad outcomes. We found that the good (bad) behavior of the characters influenced gaze preferences for good (bad) outcomes just prior to the actual outcomes being revealed. These findings suggest that beliefs about a persons moral worth encourage observers to foresee a preferred deserved outcome as the event unfolds. We include evidence to show that this effect cannot be explained in terms of affective priming or matching strategies.
Wilkinson, D.T. and Ferguson, Heather J. and Worley, Alan (2012)
Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation Modulates the Electrophysiological Response During Face Processing.
Visual Neuroscience. ISSN 0952-5238. (in press)
Abstract
Although galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) is known to affect the speed and accuracy of visual judgments, the underlying electrophysiological response has not been explored. In the present study, we therefore investigated the effect of GVS on the N170 event-related potential, a marker commonly associated with early visual structural encoding. To elicit the waveform, participants distinguished famous from non-famous faces that were presented in either upright or inverted orientation. Relative to a sham, stimulation increased the amplitude of the N170, and also elevated power spectra within the delta and theta frequency bands, components that have likewise been associated with face processing. This study constitutes the first attempt to model the effects of GVS on the electrophysiological response, and more specifically, indicates that uni-sensory visual processes linked to object construction are influenced by vestibular information. Given that reductions in the magnitude of both the N170 event-related potential and delta/theta activity accompany certain disease states, GVS may provide hitherto unreported therapeutic benefit.
Ferguson, Heather J. and Breheny, Richard (2011)
Eye movements reveal the time-course of anticipating behavior based on complex, conflicting desires.
Cognition, 119 (2). pp. 179-196. ISSN 0010-0277.
Abstract
The time-course of representing others perspectives is inconclusive across the currently available models of ToM processing. We report two visual-world studies investigating how knowledge about a characters basic preferences (e.g. Toms favourite colour is pink) and higher-order desires (his wish to keep this preference secret) compete to influence online expectations about subsequent behaviour. Participants eye movements around a visual scene were tracked while they listened to auditory narratives. While clear differences in anticipatory visual biases emerged between conditions in Experiment 1, post-hoc analyses testing the strength of the relevant biases suggested a discrepancy in the time-course of predicting appropriate referents within the different contexts. Specifically, predictions to the target emerged very early when there was no conflict between the characters basic preferences and higher-order desires, but appeared to be relatively delayed when comprehenders were provided with conflicting information about that characters desire to keep a secret. However, a second experiment demonstrated that this apparent cognitive cost in inferring behaviour based on higher-order desires was in fact driven by low-level features between the context sentence and visual scene. Taken together, these results suggest
that healthy adults are able to make complex higher-order ToM inferences without the need to call on costly cognitive processes. Results are discussed relative to previous accounts of ToM and language processing.
Ferguson, Heather J. and Scheepers, Christoph and Sanford, Anthony J. (2010)
Expectations in counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning.
Language and Cognitive Processes, 25 (3). pp. 297-346.
Abstract
During language comprehension, information about the world is exchanged and processed. Two essential ingredients of everyday cognition that are employed during language comprehension are the ability to reason counterfactually, and the ability to understand and predict other peoples behaviour by attributing independent mental states to them (theory of mind).We report two visual-world studies investigating the extent to which the constraints of world knowledge and prior context, as established by a counterfactual (Exp. 1) or a false belief situation (Exp. 2), influence eye-movements directed towards objects in a visual field. Proportions of anticipatory eye-movements indicated an initial visual bias towards contextually supported referents in both studies. Thus, we propose that
when visual information is available to reinforce linguistic input, participants
expect a context-relevant continuation. Shortly after the critical word onset, the linguistically supported referent was visually favoured, with counterfactual (but not false belief) contexts revealing a temporal delay in integrating factually inconsistent language input. Results are discussed in relation to accounts of discourse processing and the processing relationship between counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning. Finally, we compare findings across different experimental paradigms and propose a novel cluster-analytic procedure to identify time-windows of interest in visual-world data.
Tian, Ye and Breheny, Richard and Ferguson, Heather J. (2010)
Why we stimulate negated information: A dynamic pragmatic account.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63 (12). pp. 2305-2312. ISSN 1747-0218.
Abstract
A well-established finding in the simulation literature is that participants simulate the positive argument of negation soon after reading a negative sentence, prior to simulating a scene consistent with the negated sentence (Kaup, Lu¨dtke, & Zwaan, 2006; Kaup, Yaxley, Madden, Zwaan, & Lu¨dtke, 2007). One interpretation of this finding is that negation requires two steps to process: first represent what is being negated then reject that in favour of a representation of a negation-consistent state of affairs (Kaup et al., 2007). In this paper we argue that this finding with negative sentences could be a byproduct of the dynamic way that language is interpreted relative to a common ground and not the way that negation is represented. We present a study based on Kaup et al. (2007) that tests the competing accounts. Our results suggest that some negative sentences are not processed in two steps, but provide support for the alternative, dynamic account.
Bindemann, Markus and Scheepers, Christoph and Ferguson, Heather J. et al. (2010)
Face, body and centre of gravity mediate person detection in natural scenes.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 36 (6). pp. 1477-1485.
Abstract
Person detection is an important prerequisite of social interaction, but is not well understood. Following suggestions that people in the visual field can capture a viewers attention, this study examines the role of the face and the body for person detection in natural scenes. We observed that viewers tend first to look at the center of a scene, and only then to fixate on a person. When a persons face was rendered invisible in scenes, bodies were detected as quickly as faces without bodies, indicating that both are equally useful for person detection. Detection was optimized when face and body could be seen, but observers preferentially fixated faces, reinforcing the notion of a prominent role for the face in social perception. These findings have implications for claims of attention capture by faces in that they demonstrate a mediating influence of body cues and general scanning principles in natural scenes.
Ferguson, Heather J. and Sanford, Anthony J. (2008)
Anomalies in real and counterfactual worlds: An eye-movement investigation.
Journal of Memory and Language, 58 (3). pp. 609-626. ISSN 0749-596X.
Abstract
Counterfactual reasoning is valid reasoning arising from premises that are true in a hypothetical model, but false in actuality. Investigations of counterfactuals have concentrated on reasoning and production, but psycholinguistic research has been more limited. We report three eye-movement studies investigating the comprehension of counterfactual
information. Prior context depicted a counterfactual world (CW), or real world (RW), while a second sentence was manipulated to create RW anomalous continuations, where events included a violation of RW knowledge, and RW
congruent continuations, where the events described were congruent with RW knowledge. Results showed that RW violations can be neutralised within an appropriate pre-specified CW context, and RW congruent items can lead to
the experience of an anomaly following an inconsistent CW context. Importantly, there was also evidence in all three studies for early processing difficulty with RW violations regardless of prior context, indicating that a proposition is rapidly evaluated against real-world knowledge, just prior to the accommodation of a proposition into a counterfactual world representation. We discuss the results in terms of a variety of accounts of the nature of counterfactual worlds.
Ferguson, Heather J. and Sanford, Anthony J. and Leuthold, Hartmut (2008)
Eye-movements and ERPs reveal the time course of processing negation and remitting counterfactual worlds.
Brain Research, 1236. pp. 113-125. ISSN 0006-8993.
Abstract
The ability to update our current knowledge using contextual information is a vital process during every-day language comprehension. To understand a negated statement, readers are required to cancel real-world expectations, but are not explicitly provided with an alternative model. Thus, the question of how and when a negative context influences interpretation of later events arises. We report one eye-movement study (Exp. 1) and one ERP study (Exp. 2) investigating the effects of negation on discourse processing. Prior context depicted a real-world (RW), or negated-world (NW), while the second sentence was manipulated to create RW anomalous continuations, where events included a violation of RW knowledge, and RW-congruent continuations, where the events described were congruent with RW knowledge. Results from Experiment 1 showed that the negated discourse context did not influence initial processing of the target sentence, as reflected in participants' eye-movement behaviour. Similarly, Experiment 2 revealed that the typical N400 effect to semantic violations has not been reversed by introducing a negated-world context. However, in later processing, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the negated-world context is eventually incorporated into the representation of the sentence meaning. Thus, we suggest that discourse does not always have an immediate effect on language comprehension and discuss the results in terms of a variety of accounts of representing negation.
Current students
Current PhD supervision
Jumana Ahmad (1st supervisor)
Eiman Alismail (1st supervisor)
Rebecca Croll (2nd supervisor)
Serena Vanzan (2nd supervisor)
Current MSc supervision
Luise Gootjes-Dreesbach
Sai Govindh M Sunderesvaran
Miriam Tresh
Richard Weatherall
2012-15 |
Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant |
£141,940 |
2012-13 |
University of Kent Faculty of Social Sciences Research Grant |
£1000 |
2011-12 |
Experimental Psychology Society |
£2,000 |
2011 |
ESRC |
£614 |
2011 |
Nuffield Foundation Undergraduate Research Bursary (student: Nayra Martin-Key) |
£1,440 |
2011-12 |
British Academy Small Research Grant |
£7,490 |
2010 |
Acuity (Tobii eye trackers) sponsorship for internal eye-tracking workshop |
£1,000 |
2010-11 |
University of Kent Faculty of Social Sciences Research Grant |
£984 |
2009-13 |
ESRC Early Career Researchers Training and Networking Grant |
£38,500 |
Teaching
Deputy Director of Learning and Teaching
Convenor and Lecturer, SP604 Biological Psychology
Convenor and Lecturer, SP850 Advanced Cognitive (Neuroscience) Methods in Practice
Convenor, SP638 Mental Health: Diagnosis, Interventions and Treatments
Supervisor for undergraduate final year projects and MSc research projects
Other academic activities
| 2009-present | Honorary Research Fellow, University College London, Division of Psychology and Language |
| 2010 | Honorary ESRC Peer Review assessor (virtual college) |
Professional memberships
- Experimental Psychology Society
- Cognitive Neuroscience Society
- Experimental Pragmatics Network UK
- Founder and Coordinator of PsychoLinguistics in the South East Network (www.PsyLingSE.co.uk)
Contact details
| Address: |
School of Psychology |
| Tel: | +44 (0)1227 827120 |
| Fax: | +44 (0)1227 827030 |
| Email: | H.Ferguson@kent.ac.uk |
| Office: | Keynes A2.06 |
| Office Hours: | Monday 2-3pm and Tuesday 2-3pm |