Orenes, I. 1 , Moxey, L. 2 , Scheepers, C. . 2 & Santamaría, C. 1
1 Department of Psychology. University of La Laguna. Tenerife, Spain
2 Department of Psychology. University of Glasgow. Glasgow, Escocia, UK
It is assumed negative sentences are processed in two stages. For example, to understand “her dad was not rich”, people first represent the negated state of affairs “her dad was rich” and then integrate negation to represent the actual state of affairs “her dad was not rich” or even “her dad was poor” (Kaup et al. 2006). The goal of this study was to discover how this shift of attention from the negated concept (rich) toward the actual state of affairs (poor) might be modulated in everyday life. Often people use negation to correct expectations (e.g. when for some reason someone is expected to be rich we can suitably state that she is not rich; Wason, 1965).Thus, it is likely that people focus on the mentioned word longer and change their attention later when negation is used in contexts involving correction of expectations. To test this hypothesis, we presented affirmative (Her dad was poor) or negative sentences (Her dad was not rich) after two different contexts: consistent with expectation (Her dad was an unemployed person) and inconsistent with expectation (Her dad owned an important company). A total of 42 participants took part in this experiment, listening to 42 stories while two pictures appeared on the screen (in this example, a rich and a poor man). At the same time, their eye movements were recorded, and the results showed that the proportion of fixations to the picture which relates to the word explicitly mentioned in the sentence, was higher and longer for inconsistent that consistent expectation. We conclude that certain contexts can induce to maintain negated concepts in mind