Title: Understanding and awareness: The roles of conscious awareness in language processing, development and disorders.
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: In 1957, the advertising executive James Vicary gathered reporters to announce a startling finding. He had taken movie reels from a local cinema and repeatedly inserted single frames containing simple messages: "Eat popcorn" or "Drink Coca-Cola". The frames were essentially invisible, rushing by too fast for anyone to see, but their effects were extreme: A huge increase in sales at the concession stand. Vicary's finding suggested a powerful role for the unconscious in our everyday lives, and a lucrative new method for advertisers. There was just one problem: He was never able to corroborate the data. His startling result was false. In the intervening fifty years, we have learned a lot about the unconscious. Techniques for "masking" the world from consciousness have revealed the complex cognitive processes that proceed without awareness. But the role of awareness in language -- our primary means of understanding the world and making ourselves understood -- remains surprisingly unexplored, perhaps a legacy of Vicary's controversy. This project aims to correct that imbalance, investigating how understandable linguistic meanings arise from the combination of language and awareness. I want to understand the degree to which awareness of the world is a precondition for understanding and producing language. This topic is important in many different ways. It is important for science: Language and consciousness are two critical components of the human experience; understanding their interrelation can help us understand ourselves. It is important for society: Delineating the role of conscious awareness in understanding and being understood can help us to make sense of, and predict, people's behaviour. Finally, it is important for healthy development: As children grow, they have to develop the correct relationship between language and awareness. Understanding how this process might go wrong could improve the lives of both typically and atypically developing individuals. My approach is broadly focused and experimental in nature. The project examines how language and awareness interact in healthy adults, typically developing children, and individuals with schizophrenia, a developmental disorder often associated with impaired awareness. I use sophisticated experimental techniques to mask sentences from awareness, and then test the degree to which adults can still extract some understanding. I use eye tracking to measure what things in the world children, patients and healthy adults are aware of, and then test whether differences in awareness can explain some of the difficulties that both children and patients have in crafting clear, understandable descriptions of the world. The results should be important for all of the reasons set out above: They will inform both scientific theories, and methods for alleviating linguistic difficulties. And they will set the stage for future work where, in collaboration with others, I can complement our initial measurements of behaviour with an assessment of the twin neural underpinnings of language and consciousness.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES;2.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH