Processing Mechanism of Chinese Verbal Jokes : Evidence from ERP and Neural Oscillations

The cognitive processing mechanism of humor refers to how the system of neural circuitry and pathways in the brain deals with the incongruity in a humorous manner. The past research has revealed different stages and corresponding functional brain activities involved in humor-processing in terms of time and space dimensions, highlighting the effects of the time windows of about 400 ms, 600 ms, and 900 ms. However, much less is known about humor processing in light of the frequency dimension. A total of 36 Chinese participants were recruited in this experiment, with Chinese jokes, nonjokes, and nonsensical sentences used as the stimuli. The experimental results showed that there were signific…