题目：Time for Meaning: What electrophysiology reveals about how the brain makes sense of the world (大脑获得“意义”的时间：通过电生理方法揭示人类获得意义信息的大脑机制)
主讲人：Kara D. Federmeier 教授
时间：2014年5月9日（星期五）下午3:00-5:00
地点：心理学院五楼学术报告厅
主讲人简介：
Kara D. Federmeier教授，美国伊利诺伊斯大学香槟分校及贝克曼研究所双聘教授。Federmeier教授的研究主要集中在语言和记忆的认知机制，尤其是双侧大脑半球在语言和记忆中的不同作用，以及认知老化在语言和记忆中的机制。至今已在Annual Review of Psychology, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience等国际权威学术期刊发表论文超过80篇。由于她在学术研究上的杰出贡献，她于2006年获得美国生理心理学协会颁发的“早期职业生涯杰出成就奖”，于2010年获得美国认知神经科学学会颁发的“杰出青年学者奖”，2012年获得美国伊利诺伊斯大学“大学学者奖”。
主页：http://cognitionandbrainlab.org/
讲座摘要：
How does the human brain so rapidly and reliably link complex perceptual stimuli, such as words, to the information stored in long-term memory that constitutes the "meaning" of those words? Electrophysiological data suggest that meaning is accessed through a stimulus-elicited, temporally-delimited process that binds neural activity across a distributed, multimodal brain network. In contrast to long-standing views that treat the recognition of words (and other meaningful stimuli) as occurring primarily through feed-forward processing that it relatively impervious to context, our work has shown that the language comprehension system uses context information to predict semantic and even perceptual features of likely upcoming words. The fact that some information may be available to the brain even before the word actually appears is likely an important part of what allows meaning processing to be as fast and effective as it usually is. However, although prediction seems important for comprehension, it also appears susceptible to age-related deterioration and can be associated with processing costs. Intriguingly, our research suggests that the brain might use both predictive and more "bottom-up" processing strategies in parallel, distributed across the left and right cerebral hemispheres. In particular, we have shown that whereas the right hemisphere processes language inputs in a feedforward manner, the left hemisphere is more likely to generate predictions, perhaps because comprehension mechanisms are integrated with language production mechanisms only in the left hemisphere, which is strongly dominant for speech. Overall, our research has revealed that there is a "time for meaning".