Inducing Shifts in Attentional and Preattentive Visual Processing Through Brief Training on Novel Grammatical Morphemes: An Event-Related Potential Study

Abstract

Can brief training on novel grammatical morphemes influence visual processing of nonlinguistic stimuli? If so, how deep is this effect? Here, an experimental group learned two novel morphemes highlighting the familiar concept of transitivity in sentences; a control group was exposed to the same input but with the novel morphemes used interchangeably. Subsequently, both groups performed two visual oddball tasks with nonlinguistic motion events. In the first (attentional) oddball task, relative to the control group, the experimental group showed decreased attention (P300) to infrequent changes in the morpheme-irrelevant dimension (shape) but not the morpheme-relevant dimension (motion transitivity); in the second (preattentive) oddball task, they showed enhanced preattentive responses (N1/visual mismatch negativity) to infrequent changes in motion transitivity but not shape. Our findings show that increasing attention to preexisting concepts in sentences through brief training on novel grammatical morphemes can influence both attentional and preattentive visual processing.