Negative sentences exhibit a sustained effect in delayed verification tasks.

Abstract

Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., polarity effect). We present evidence that two factors contribute to the polarity effect in verification tasks: processing the sentence and verifying its truth value. To quantify the relative contribution of each, we used a delayed verification task. The results show that even when participants are given a considerable amount of time for processing the sentence prior to verification, the polarity effect is not entirely eliminated. We suggest that this sustained effect stems from a retained negation-containing representation in working memory.

Testing two-step models of negative quantification using a novel machine learning analysis of EEG

“…Participants involved their working memory in the comparison between picture and sentence representations. Our findings align with the recent hypothesis that negative quantifiers add more load to working memory than positive ones (Agmon et al, 2022 ).…”

“…Barwise & Cooper, 1981 ). The predictions of this model bore out in recent reaction time experiments (Agmon et al, 2022 ).…”

“…Two-step models postulate two sources of processing difficulties. The first one is at the level of mental representation and refers to the complexity of this representation (Agmon et al, 2022 ; Clark & Chase, 1972 ; Grodzinsky et al, 2018 ; Kaup et al, 2006 ). The second source lies in the verification procedure and steps involved in the computation of a sentence truth value (Agmon et al, 2022 ; Clark & Chase, 1972 ; Grodzinsky et al, 2018 ).…”

“…Heim, 2006 ). 1 Recently, Agmon et al ( 2022 ) suggested that downward monotonicity might contribute to the polarity effect by increasing working memory load. When verifying negative quantifiers, participants have to retrieve a non-default entailment pattern, which in turn results in increasing the processing cost.…”

Human verifications: Computable with truth values outside logic

“…Others have drawn analogous conclusions, notably Roger Penrose, who argued from a similar basis that awareness of the results of verifications is not computable and calls for a new physics ( 3 ). Of course, most verifications are straightforward as psychologists know from many experiments ( 4 – 8 ) even including studies of brain activity ( 9 – 11 ). The main surprise was that individuals are faster to determine that an affirmative assertion is true rather than false whereas they are faster to determine that a negative assertion is false rather than true ( 12 ).…”