1. METHOD RW- inconsistent / consistent If cats are hungry they usually pester their owners until they get fed. Families could feed their cat a bowl of carrots/ fish and it would gobble it down happily CW- consistent/ inconsistent If cats were vegetarians they would be cheaper for owners to look after. Families could feed their cat a bowl of carrots/ fish and it would gobble it down happily. Janet unpacked the belongings and put the postcard in the cupboard. Reality- inconsistent/ consistent Later, Janet saw Barry move the postcard from the cupboard to the drawer. Later, Janet wanted to see the postcard so she looked in the cupboard/ drawer and smiled. Belief- consistent/ inconsistent While Janet was distracted, Barry moved the postcard from the cupboard to the drawer. Later, Janet wanted to see the postcard so she looked in the cupboard/ drawer and smiled. - SMI Eyelink II head-mounted eye-tracker - 24 experimental items in a fixed random order alongside filler items, within-subjects 2x2 design - 28 native English speakers (16 female) COUNTERFACTUALS- RESULTS - Participants anticipated towards a contextually relevant referent from 200 msec prior to critical word onset -Shortly after the onset of the target word, however, the relevant ‘appropriate’ referent was visually favoured -No effects of gender were detected BELIEFS OF OTHERS- RESULTS - Participants anticipated towards a contextually relevant referent from 560 msec prior to critical word onset -As with counterfactuals, the relevant ‘appropriate’ referent was visually favoured shortly after target word onset -Clusters 1 and 2 showed a significant gender x context interaction -Females showed very early (1500 msec prior to target word onset) context-biased expectancies on the theory of mind task, while males showed no significant anticipation towards a referent in this task PREDICTING EVENTS ACCORDING TO A COUNTERFACTUAL WORLD OR THE BELIEFS OF OTHERS: EVIDENCE OF A GENDER BIAS IN PROCESSING Heather J Ferguson, Anthony J Sanford and Christoph Scheepers Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow BACKGROUND The ability to update our current knowledge using contextual information is a vital process during every-day language comprehension. Counterfactual reasoning, an understanding of events that are counter to reality, is an essential ingredient of our everyday cognition. Similarly, the ability to understand and predict other peoples’ behaviour by attributing independent mental states to them is a uniquely human ability known as ‘theory of mind’. Numerous experiments have used the visual world paradigm to demonstrate that discourse processing is driven by predictive relationships involving syntax, semantics and real-world expectations. However, it is not clear whether these fundamental processing strategies can be influenced by introducing either a counterfactual context or by manipulating the beliefs of others. The issue we examined, therefore, was whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse to over-ride real-world knowledge to predict specific upcoming words as the current sentence is unfolding. GLASGOW LANGUAGE PROCESSING CONCLUSIONS -Results provide the first evidence that real-world biases in the visual world paradigm can be ‘neutralised’ by a prior context, suggesting that when visual information is available to reinforce linguistic input, participants expect a context-relevant continuation -We also present the first on-line investigation into the comprehension of the beliefs of others and show evidence to support a gender bias in cognition (see Baron-Cohen, 2002) -Here, females show better performance at predicting others’ actions based on their intentions, beliefs and desires than males -This significant gender bias was not present when predicting events in a counterfactual world, suggesting different processes underlying the two tasks Baron-Cohen, S. (2002). The extreme male brain theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1;6(6):248-254