When "not being guilty" does not mean "being innocent" - experimental perspective on negation

Negation is one of the most fundamental concepts, essential in everyday communication. Every natural language has some means to express negation. For centuries, negation has been an object of theoretical investigation for philosophers, logicians, and linguists. More recently, it has become a popular topic for experimental psychologists and cognitive scientists. The studies on negation have also practical applications in education or consultancy. Psychological studies on negation established that sentences containing negation are more difficult to process than affirmative sentences. Some models of negation explain this finding by postulating that the sentence with negation (e.g, "I am not guilty") is represented in two steps. In the first step, the so-called to-be-negated content (e.g, "I am guilty") must be represented. In the second step, the negation is processed. These models explain also why sentences with negation are often remembered contrary to the intention. For example, when you say that you "are not guilty" it could be remembered as you "being guilty" rather than "being innocent".During this course, we will set the theoretical background for studies on negation and discuss different models of negation processing, experimental findings about negation, and their practical applications.