Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS)
Cog Lunch: Halie Olson "Experimentally-controlled naturalistic neuroimaging: Using Sesame Street to examine language processing in the brain"
Description
Speaker: Halie Olson
Lab: SaxeLab
Title: Experimentally-controlled naturalistic neuroimaging: Using Sesame Street to examine language processing in the brain
Abstract: To characterize the cortical basis of cognitive function, and how it changes with development, cognitive neuroscientists have used two kinds of approaches with complementary strengths. On the one hand, ‘experimentally-controlled’ designs deliberately manipulate contrasts of interest, which can offer high powered tests of a priori valuable distinctions by introducing minimal pairs to rule out confounds. On the other hand, ‘naturalistic’ stimuli like movies simultaneously manipulate many perceptual properties, evoke rich representational structures, and are highly engaging and accessible to a wide range of participants. For some purposes, it would be ideal to have experimental designs that combine the strengths of both approaches: rich, engaging, naturalistic stimuli, within which researchers introduce carefully controlled manipulations to test specific hypotheses. We developed such an experiment by manipulating video clips from Sesame Street to study language processing. To validate our approach, we scanned 20 adults on our novel fMRI tasks, as well as previously-validated localizers for language and theory of mind. In ongoing work, we are collecting fMRI data using these tasks in toddlers.