Attentional resource consumption of verbal-humor processing: An ERP study

As a high-demanding mental activity with both cognitive and emotional factors, verbal-humor processing consumes more attentional resources than non-humor processing, which has been demonstrated by behavioral studies, but little has been examined at a real-time scale. Based on the three-stage model (incongruity detection, incongruity resolution, and mirth), the current study used event-related potential (ERP) and event-related oscillation (ERO) to explore the attentional resource consumption of verbal-humor processing by employing a dual-task paradigm in which sentence comprehension (humorous, positive, neutral) was the primary task and arithmetical calculation (simple, difficult) was the secondary task.

Participants’ (N=38) behavioral performance and ERP/ERO measures in two tasks were analyzed. ERP results of verbal-humor processing revealed significantly larger LAN, LLAN, and LPP activation, which indexed three stages. ERO results showed significant beta power changes in the detection stage and theta changes in the resolution and mirth stages. The behavioral data indicated that the Reaction Times (RTs) of the arithmetical task following verbal-humor processing were longer than those following non-humorous positive and neutral ones. The ERP results of arithmetical calculation found that the calculations following verbal-humor processing elicited significantly greater P2, P3b, and positive slow wave amplitudes than those following the other two processings, which reflected more resource allocation in the calculation to compensate for the resource preemption of verbal-humor processing. In addition, the calculation following positive sentence exhibited a greater ERP amplitude in the relatively early P2 time intervals than that following the neutral sentences. Collectively, the behavioral, ERP, and ERO results concurrently confirmed that verbal-humor processing consumed more attentional resources compared with non-humorous counterparts, and moreover, the comparison of ERP following humorous and positive sentences suggested that the processing of the cognitive factor consumes more attentional resources than the emotional factor although both factors play a role in the process.