The brain uses minimum effort to look for key information in text

Date:
June 11, 2020
Source:
University of Helsinki
Summary:
The human brain avoids taking unnecessary effort. When a person
is reading, she strives to gain as much information as possible
by dedicating as little of her cognitive capacity as possible to
the processing.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
By analysing brain activity, researchers found that the brain regulates
its resource use and tries to identify the most essential information.


==========================================================================
A recently completed study indicates that the human brain avoids taking unnecessary effort. When a person is reading, she strives to gain as
much information as possible by dedicating as little of her cognitive
capacity as possible to the processing.

This is a finding presented in an article by specialists in computer
science and psychology at the University of Helsinki, published in
May in the Scientific Reports journal, a multidisciplinary open-access publication platform operated by the publishers of the Nature journal.

According to the study, the brain is processing information by taking
into account the relative importance of the content that is being
read. When the brain is interpreting the meaning of the words being read,
it attempts to allocate resources to interpreting the words that provide
as much information as possible on the content of the text.

Previous studies have shown that word length and frequency, as well as syntactic and semantic errors included in sentences in sentences affect
brain activity to language.

In the recently published study, the perspective was expanded to the
level above individual sentences, the discourse level. It was studied
using six- sentence paragraphs. At this level, the relationship between
words becomes increasingly complex, and the significance of context in interpreting individual words is increased. On the discourse level, very
little about information processing by the brain has been known so far.



========================================================================== Difference between high and low value of information The researchers
developed a model based on information theory to determine the
informativeness of words and associated these with brain activity. A
study was conducted by having volunteers read sentences from Wikipedia
entries while recording their brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). In the EEG, a selective electric brain potential was observed in response to reading high- versus low-value words.

"When someone reads the sentence 'Cats are small, usually furry mammals',
words such as 'mammal' and 'furry' evoke a particular pattern of
brain activity. This suggests that the brain is efficiently processing information: concentrating its efforts there where the most additional
value in understanding the message is to be gained," says Michiel Spape',
a senior researcher who contributed to the study.

A related finding revealed that, by using AI-based techniques, brain measurements pertaining to individual words can be used to predict
whether the information gain for the words read is low or high.

"Consequently, we are able to predict the information gain of content
processed by people without accessing the content itself. Instead, we
only utilise brain measurements," says Tuukka Ruotsalo, Academy research
fellow in charge of the study at the University of Helsinki.

The results can be utilised in future brain-information interfaces,
which observe brain function when people perceive and process various
types of information.

"Such applications could be used, for example, in healthcare, or, in the future, even in modelling the tastes, values and opinions of ordinary consumers," Ruotsalo says.

Ruotsalo points out that the research is only at its basic stage.

"Practical applications are associated with ethical and technical
challenges that must be solved before anything concrete can be developed."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Helsinki. Original
written by Aino Pekkarinen. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Lauri Kangassalo, Michiel Spape', Niklas Ravaja, Tuukka Ruotsalo.

Information gain modulates brain activity evoked
by reading. Scientific Reports, 2020; 10 (1) DOI:
10.1038/s41598-020-63828-5 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200611114536.htm

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