Electrophysiological support for strategic processing of spatial sentences

The aims of the present EEG study were to distinguish between the various representation options of spatial sentences and to gain insight into the moment at which differences in the processing of spatial sentences arise. To examine the possible existence of different strategies, we used sentence-sentence and sentence-picture verification trials in mixed blocks, whereby the probability of a specific second stimulus was fixed within a block but varied between blocks. Brain activation (slow wave, 550-1100 ms after stimulus onset) linked to parsing spatial sentences (and not nonspatial sentences) occurred at parieto-occipital regions associated with mental image processing, and only when participants were expecting to compare verbal information to a picture. Therefore, this study provides neuroimaging evidence that different representational formats of spatial sentences arise almost directly when people are reading a spatial sentence.