Can We Prepare to Negate? Negation as a Reversal Operator

Negation Processing in Children with ADHD: The Generic Problem of Using Negation in Instructions

Recent studies have suggested that negation comprehension falls back onto inhibitory brain systems that are also crucial for impulse control and other non-linguistic control domains (Beltran et al., 2018, 2019; de Vega et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2020). Against this backdrop, the present pilot study investigated the use of negation within directional instructions (i.e., "not left", "now left", "not right", "now right") in children with ADHD and a control group. The results indicate that children in general have a long response delay following negative compared to affirmative instructions. Additionally, there was a tendency for this effect to be more pronounced in the ADHD group. Together, these results suggest that negation processing might indeed demand inhibitory control processes, which are differently available across different subgroups. Thus, the current study provides evidence that using negation in imperatives or instructions is generally rather critical and should be avoided if possible, but that negation use is probably even more problematic in specific clinical populations. Potential implications of these results will be discussed.

"Looking at" Negation: Faster Processing for Symbolic Rather Than Iconic Representations

Many studies have shown the double processing of negation, suggesting that negation integration into sentence meaning is delayed. This contrasts with some researches that have found that such integration is rather immediate. The present study contributes to this debate. Affirmative and negative compound sentences (e.g., "because he was not hungry, he did not order a salad") were presented orally in a visual world paradigm while four printed words were on the screen: salad, no salad, soup, and no soup. The eye-tracking data showed two different fixation patterns for negative causal assertions, which are linked to differences in the representation and inferential demands. One indicates that negation is integrated immediately, as people look at the explicit negation (e.g., no salad) very early. The other, in which people look at the alternate (e.g., soup) much later, indicates that what is delayed in time is the representation of the alternate. These results support theories that combine iconic and symbolic representations, such as the model theory.

Inhibitory Mechanisms in the Processing of Negations: A Neural Reuse Hypothesis

Negation is known to have inhibitory consequences for the information under its scope. However, how it produces such effects remains poorly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that negation processing might be implemented at the neural level by the recruitment of inhibitory and cognitive control mechanisms. On this line, this manuscript offers the hypothesis that negation reuses general-domain mechanisms that subserve inhibition in other non-linguistic cognitive functions. The first two sections describe the inhibitory effects of negation on conceptual representations and its embodied effects, as well as the theoretical foundations for the reuse hypothesis. The next section describes the neurophysiological evidence that linguistic negation interacts with response inhibition, along with the suggestion that both functions share inhibitory mechanisms. Finally, the manuscript concludes that the functional relation between negation and inhibition observed at the mechanistic level could be easily integrated with predominant cognitive models of negation processing.

Pictorial vs. linguistic negation: Investigating negation in imperatives across different symbol domains

The processing of negation is typically regarded as one of the most demanding cognitive processes as it often involves the reversal of input information. As negation is also regarded as a core linguistic process, to date, investigations of negation have typically been linguistic in nature. However, negation is a standard operator also within non-linguistic domains. For example, traffic signs often use negation to indicate a prohibition of specific actions (e.g., no left turn). In the current study, we investigate whether processing difficulties that are typically reported within the linguistic domain generalize to pictorial negation. Across two experiments, linguistic negation and pictorial negation were directly compared to their affirmative counterparts. In line with the literature, the results show that there is a general processing benefit for pictorial input. Most interestingly, the core process of negation also benefits from the pictorial input. Specifically, the processing difficulty in pictorial negation compared to affirmation is less pronounced than within the linguistic domain, especially concerning error rates. In the current experiments, pictorial negation did not result in increased error rates compared to the affirmative condition. Overall, the current results suggest that negation in pictorial conditions also results in a slowing of information processing. However, the use of pictorial negation can ease processing difficulty over linguistic negation.

Negation as conflict: Conflict adaptation following negating vertical spatial words

In this study, we investigated whether the processing of negated directional terms such as "not up" or "not down" poses a conflict for participants and results in similar processing adjustments as non-linguistic conflicts do (Dudschig & Kaup, 2019). In each trial, participants read one of the following four phrases "now up", "not up", "now down" or "not down" and responded with a button press on a response key mounted in the upper versus lower vertical space. Behavioral data indicated that processing negated phrases leads to considerable processing difficulties for participants even after extensive practice. Interestingly, in line with standard conflict adaptation effects reported in the Simon, the Flanker and the Stroop task, negation processing was facilitated when preceded by another high conflict trial (i.e. a negated trial) as compared to a low conflict trial (i.e. an affirmative phrase). In addition, electrophysiological data showed that in negated trials first the to-be-negated information was activated (i.e., up in the case of "not up") and only in a second step, the outcome of the negation process was represented (i.e. down). In line with behavioral data, electrophysiological data was modified by trial sequence, suggesting negation triggering standard conflict adaptation patterns. Taken together, conflict-related processing adjustments can be also observed if the conflict is triggered by linguistic negation of vertical directional words. Implications of these findings are discussed.