School of Psychology

Experience Excellence Studying People


Dr Heather J Ferguson

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

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

    Callan, Mitch J. and Ferguson, Heather J. and Bindemann, Markus (2013) Eye movements to audio-visual scenes reveal expectations of a just world. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142. pp. 34-40.

    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 person’s good or bad behavior can also bias people’s 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 person’s 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.

    Ferguson, Heather J. and Tresh, Miriam and Leblond, Julien (2013) Examining mental simulations of uncertain events. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20 (2). pp. 391-399. ISSN 1069-9384.

    Abstract

    A great deal of research into the experiential nature of language has demonstrated that our understanding of events is facilitated through mental simulations of the described linguistic input. However, to date little is understood about how contextual uncertainty about the described event might influence the content and strength of these mental representations, or the cognitive effort involved. In this paper, we report a single experiment, where participants read sentences, such as “The old lady [knows/thinks] that the picnic basket is open”. Following a delay of 250ms or 1500ms, they responded to pictures that varied in the physical form of the target object (matching vs. mismatching). Results revealed an expected facilitation effect for matching images, but more importantly they also showed interference effects (longer reaction times) at the shorter ISI (250ms), following the uncertain verb ‘thinks’ compared to the certain verb ‘knows’. At the longer ISI, this effect was no longer present. This suggests that at the short ISI, uncertain conditions required extra time to construct and map a simulation of events onto the available image. Results are discussed in terms of the mechanisms involved in representing possible events and with reference to related literature on perspective-taking.

    Breheny, Richard and Ferguson, Heather J. and Katsos, Napoleon (2013) Taking the Epistemic Step: Toward a Model of On-line Access to Conversational Implicatures. Cognition, 126 (3). pp. 423-440. ISSN 0010-0277.

    Abstract

    There is a growing body of evidence showing that conversational implicatures are rapidly accessed in incremental utterance interpretation. To date, studies showing incremental access have focussed on implicatures related to linguistic triggers, such as ‘some’ and ‘or’. We discuss three kinds of on-line model that can account for this data. A model built around the notion of linguistic alternatives stored in the lexicon would only account for linguistically triggered implicatures of the kind already studied and not so-called ‘particularised’ implicatures that are not associated with specific linguistic items. A second model built around the idea of focus alternatives could handle both linguistically triggered implicatures and so-called particularised implicatures but would be insensitive to the role that information about the speaker’s mental state plays in deriving implicatures. A third more fully ‘Gricean’ model takes account of the speaker’s mental state in accessing these implications. In this paper we present a visual world study using a new interactive paradigm where two communicators (one confederate) describe visually-presented events to each other as their eye movements are monitored. In this way, we directly compare the suitability of these three kinds of model. We show hearers can access contextually specific particularised implicatures in on-line comprehension. Moreover, we show that in doing so, hearers are sensitive to the relevant mental states of the speaker. We conclude with a discussion of how such a model may be developed and of how our findings inform a longstanding debate on the immediacy of online perspective taking in language comprehension.

    Haigh, Matthew and Ferguson, Heather J. and Stewart, Andrew J. (2013) An eye-tracking investigation into readers’ sensitivity to actual versus expected utility in the comprehension of conditionals. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. ISSN 1747-0218. (in press)

    Abstract

    The successful comprehension of a utility conditional (i.e., an ‘if p, then q’ statement where p and/or q is valued by one or more agents) requires the construction of a mental representation of the situation described by that conditional, and integration of this representation with prior context. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined the time course of integrating conditional utility information into the broader discourse model. Specifically, the experiment determined whether readers were sensitive, during rapid heuristic processing, to the congruency between the utility of the consequent clause of a conditional (positive or negative) and a reader’s subjective expectations based on prior context. On a number of eye-tracking measures we found that readers were sensitive to conditional utility; conditionals for which the consequent utility mismatched that which would be anticipated on the basis of prior context resulted in processing disruption. Crucially, this sensitivity emerged on measures which are accepted to indicate early processing within the language comprehension system, and suggests that the evaluation of a conditional’s utility informs the early stages of conditional processing.

    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.

    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 partner’s 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 speaker’s intended referents.

    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.

    Wilkinson, D.T. and Ferguson, Heather J. and Worley, Alan (2012) Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation Modulates the Electrophysiological Response During Face Processing. Visual Neuroscience, 29 (4-5). pp. 255-262. ISSN 0952-5238.

    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.

    Stewart, Andrew J. and Haigh, Matthew and Ferguson, Heather J. (2012) Sensitivity to speaker control in the online comprehension of conditional tips and promises: an eye-tracking study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. (in press)

    Abstract

    Statements of the form if...then.... can be used to communicate conditional speech acts such as tips and promises. Conditional promises require the speaker to have perceived control over the outcome event while conditional tips do not. In an eye-tracking study we examined whether readers are sensitive to information about perceived speaker control during processing of conditionals embedded in context. On a number of eye-tracking measures we found that readers are sensitive to whether or not the speaker of a conditional has perceived control over the consequent event; conditional promises (which require the speaker to have perceived control over the consequent) result in processing disruption for contexts where this control is absent. Conditional tips (which do not require perceived control) are processed equivalently easily regardless of context. These results suggest that readers rapidly utilise pragmatic information related to perceived control in order to represent conditional speech acts as they are read.

    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 character’s basic preferences (e.g. Tom’s 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 character’s basic preferences and higher-order desires, but appeared to be relatively delayed when comprehenders were provided with conflicting information about that character’s 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 viewer’s 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 person’s 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.

Total publications in KAR: 15 [See all in KAR]
Information obtained from the Kent Academic Repository. The University of Kent official repository of academic activity.
More information about the Kent Academic Repository

 

 

Current students

Current PhD supervision

Jumana Ahmad (1st supervisor), 'An electrophysiological and computational exploration of the working memory deficit in developmental dyslexia'

Eiman Alismail (1st supervisor), 'The role of familiarity in action understanding and imitation: investigating mirror neurons in Saudi children with ASD'

Miriam Tresh (1st supervisor), 'Comprehending Uncertainty in healthy and ASD Individuals'

Serena Vanzan (2nd supervisor), 'The effects of vestibular stimulation on awareness'

Rebecca Croll (3rd supervisor), 'How preschool children learn to understand and use referentiality'

Current MSc supervision

Luise Gootjes-Dreesbach

Sai Govindh M Sunderesvaran

Richard Weatherall


2012-15

Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant
'Understanding the minds of others: A cognitive approach to Theory of Mind'
Principal Investigator

£141,940

2012-13

University of Kent Faculty of Social Sciences Research Grant
Eye tracker research: implications for serious game development

£1000

2011-12

Experimental Psychology Society
'Examining the time-course of brain responses to factual and counterfactual alternatives'

£2,000

2011

ESRC
Training Bursary to attend 14th EEGlab Workshop

£614

2011

Nuffield Foundation Undergraduate Research Bursary (student: Nayra Martin-Key)
'Using eye movements to examine the relationship between proneness to violence, emotional intelligence, empathy and theory of mind'

£1,440

2011-12

British Academy Small Research Grant
Modulation of the N170 Event-Related Potential during galvanic vestibular stimulation
Co-Investigator

£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
Examining the brain's responses to counterfactual information

£984

2009-13

ESRC Early Career Researchers Training and Networking Grant
Experimental Pragmatics Network in Europe
Named applicant

£38,500

Teaching

Deputy Director of Graduate Studies

Convenor and Lecturer, SP604 Biological Psychology

Convenor and Lecturer, SP850 Advanced Cognitive (Neuroscience) Methods in Practice

Convenor and Lecturer, SP641 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
Keynes College
University of Kent
Canterbury
Kent
CT2 7NP
United Kingdom

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

School of Psychology - Keynes College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NP

Tel: +44 (0)1227 824775; Fax: +44 (0)1227 827030 or Email the School

Last Updated: 15/11/2012