Dr. Nora Beier’s talk “The role of temporal prediction in guiding attention through time during language comprehension”

Introduction

Dr. Nora Beier is a postdoctoral scholar working with Dr. George Mangun and Dr. Tamara Swaab at the intersection of language and attention. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Davis working with Dr. Fernanda Ferreira. Her postdoctoral research, funded by an NIH F32 grant, explores the neural correlates of attention during speech comprehension, measured through alpha oscillations and cortical tracking of speech using EEG. In particular, her project investigates whether attention is pre-allocated to particular words in time through rhythmic and non-rhythmic temporal predictions.

Interview

1. What inspired you to pursue a Ph.D. in Psychology with Dr. Fernanda Ferreira at UC Davis?

I decided to pursue a PhD during my undergrad. I really enjoyed my first experiences as an undergraduate research assistant, and I wanted to be able to conduct my own experiments to understand the mind. My first chance to do that was through an undergraduate senior thesis, where I designed an experiment measuring peoples’ emotional responses to music across different cultures. At UC Davis I was able to continue and expand this project, working with Dr. Petr Janata and Dr. Fernanda Ferreira. I then switched the focus of my research from music to language, working primarily with Dr. Ferreira and various other collaborators.
 

2. You completed your Ph.D.  here at Davis where you are currently a postdoctoral scholar with Dr. Ron Mangun and Dr. Tamara Swaab. How would you describe your academic journey?

In my postdoctoral research I made another jump across fields, from psycholinguistics to the neural mechanisms of attention. While I primarily used behavioral and eye-tracking measures in my PhD, I am now learning to study language using electrophysiology (EEG), borrowing methods from non-linguistic studies. I would say that in some ways my academic journey has been linear, in that I went straight from undergrad to a PhD program and then to being a postdoctoral scholar. However, while I have consistently been drawn to conducting independent research, the topics of my research have been all over the place. I have always ignored the (probably reasonable) advice to stick to one niche, developing a series of similar experiments to incrementally investigate a specific question. On the surface my studies might appear extremely different, as they use different methodologies and arise from different fields and literatures; however, I conceive them as parts of a large overarching story, one that I hope to complete over my entire research career.
 

3. Your research work focuses on the intersection between attention and language. Could you share some key findings from your research?

My research has been centered on the study of information structure, which is the idea that in any sentence, not all information is equally important. Some words convey new important information, which as a listener you should pay more attention to; however, sentences often also contain “given”, redundant information, or things you might already know and do not need to pay as close attention to. In my dissertation I explored the psycholinguistics literature on this topic, which has argued that listeners try to predict the timing of upcoming important information so that they can prepare to pay more attention to it. However, I noticed that many other aspects of language processing could be influenced by information structure: for example, some of my dissertation studies show that focusing a word through syntactic wh-clefts (e.g., “What he did was…”) influences semantic predictions for upcoming words. So, it is not clear whether information structure influences attention per se, and if so, when and through which neural mechanisms. My current study addresses these questions through EEG, which can reveal the specific attentional processes as they unfold over the sentence. For example, we can analyze the number of alpha oscillations in the EEG signal (frequencies between 8 and 13 Hz): the less alpha we measure, the more a participant was paying attention to the stimuli. Information structure is manipulated through questions and answers, for example: “Which man was wearing the hat?” vs. “What hat was the man wearing?”, followed by the same answer “The man on the corner was wearing the dark hat”, where either “corner” or “dark” is focused by the preceding question. We are still collecting data, but preliminary findings suggest that participants are indeed preparing to pay attention to important upcoming words, as reflected through alpha oscillations. Behaviorally, we see that words that were focused by the preceding question are remembered better, and an analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) reveals a Left Frontal Negativity for focused words, which may reflect stronger engagement of working memory.

4. Your research is interdisciplinary, which provides opportunities as well as challenges in your line of research. What has been your experience in conducting research at the intersection of disciplines? What are some of the advantages that you have found that have allowed you to pursue your research interests?

Interdisciplinary research can definitely be challenging! Bridging across fields means you have to become knowledgeable in many different literatures, reading studies that use very different methods and rely on different theoretical backgrounds. So, in some ways it can feel that you don’t have as much expertise in any specific topic as someone who focuses all their time into one field. For this reason, I like to form strong relationships with collaborators that are experts in each of the fields I’m interested in; collaboration is absolutely essential to interdisciplinarity, as each member of the team contributes their own expertise and perspective. Another challenge is that it can be difficult to communicate your research effectively across different audiences who may be familiar with only part of the theoretical background and terminology; the way I explain my research and the elements that I focus on vary depending on whether I talk to a group of linguists or a group of neuroscientists. This is especially hard when writing grants, where you have little control over the expertise of the reviewers, and there is very limited space to cover the theoretical background, so many concepts have to be oversimplified. However, in my opinion the benefits of interdisciplinary research overcome these challenges. Often many fields study similar questions in parallel, with little overlap. Noticing these links can be a great source of inspiration for new research directions and can help make your research stand out. I usually find that the most interesting and influential studies are those that applied ideas and methods developed in one field to questions stemming from a different discipline. I think that building these bridges is essential for each of these separate, parallel lines of research to grow.