I'm very happy to announce that my PhD student Anna (co-supervisor: @CerstinMahlow) has published her first first-author paper (open access):

Małgorzata Anna Ułasik and Aleksandra Miletić (2024). "Automated Extraction and Analysis of Sentences under Production: A Theoretical Framework and Its Evaluation.” In: Languages 9(3), 71.

https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9030071

#WritingResearch #LanguageProduction #Linguistics

Automated Extraction and Analysis of Sentences under Production: A Theoretical Framework and Its Evaluation

Sentences are generally understood to be essential communicative units in writing that are built to express thoughts and meanings. Studying sentence production provides a valuable opportunity to shed new light on the writing process itself and on the underlying cognitive processes. Nevertheless, research on the production of sentences in writing remains scarce. We propose a theoretical framework and an open-source implementation that aim to facilitate the study of sentence production based on keystroke logs. We centre our approach around the notion of sentence history: all the versions of a given sentence during the production of a text. The implementation takes keystroke logs as input and extracts sentence versions, aggregates them into sentence histories and evaluates the sentencehood of each sentence version. We provide detailed evaluation of the implementation based on a manually annotated corpus of texts in French, German and English. The implementation yields strong results on the three processing aspects.

MDPI

Jazz musicians reveal role of expectancy in human creativity

Have you ever wondered how creativity works in the brain? It's a complex and multifaceted concept, and while we don't fully understand it yet, many believe that it involves real-time combinations of known neural and cognitive processes. One interesting model of creativity comes from musical improvisation, like in jazz music, where musicians spontaneously create novel sound sequences. Many researchers believe that creativity involves the integration and combination of known neural and cognitive processes in real-time, allowing individuals to generate novel ideas or solve problems in innovative ways.

One area that has received particular attention in the study of creativity is musical improvisation, which involves the spontaneous creation of novel musical ideas in real-time. In this study, the authors investigate whether individuals with training in musical improvisation, such as jazz musicians, might process expectations differently than individuals without this training. To test this hypothesis, they compare jazz improvisers, non-improvising musicians, and non-musicians in a domain-general task of divergent thinking (which involves generating a large number of creative ideas in response to a given prompt) and a musical task involving preference ratings for chord progressions that vary in terms of their level of expectation. While participants completed these tasks, their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG).

The results of the study showed that jazz musicians preferred unexpected chord progressions in the musical task, and that unexpected stimuli elicited larger early and mid-latency EEG responses (ERAN and P3b) in jazz musicians, followed by smaller long-latency responses (Late Positivity Potential). These EEG responses were also significantly correlated with behavioral measures of fluency and originality on the divergent thinking task. These findings suggest that expectancy may play a role in creativity, and that individuals with training in musical improvisation may process expectations differently than those without this training.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2017.09.008

#creativity #musicalimprovisation #neuralprocesses #divergentthinking #expectancy #EEG #ERP #P3b #LPP #ERAN #divergentthinkingtask #chordprogressions #fluency #originality #expectation #jazzmusicians #non-improvisers #non-musicians #real-time #mentalprocesses #opennesstoexperience #improvisationtraining #artisticexpertise #neuralunderpinnings #deviance #unexpectedevents #P3 #noveltydetection #arousal #engagement #MismatchNegativity #auditoryprediction #comparison #musicalsyntax #learning #experience #emotion #meaninginmusic #motivatingevents #affectiveappraisal #sensorydomains #motorcontrol #languageproduction #music #jazz #musicians #chords