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Imagining activities: The role of perspective and grammatical aspect

Abstract

The ability to imagine events is important to regular thought processes such as remembering and understanding theworld in general. Two EEG experiments were conducted to investigate the difficulty associated with imagining activities fromdifferent visual perspectives. Experiment 1 involved participants imagining ongoing activities (e.g., I was skating) from a firstand third person perspective. Experiment 2 involved completed activities (I skated) and also included a condition in whichparticipants imagined other people from a third person perspective (Karen skated). Slow cortical brain potentials revealed thatthe third-person perspective was generally the most difficult to imagine and that the third-person-self perspective was moredifficult than the third-person-other perspective. Imagining activities as ongoing or completed did not influence the pattern ofresults. This research provides novel neurocognitive and behavioural insight into how event representation is influenced bytemporal information associated with verbs and the perspective from which an event is represented.

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