I 5683 you: dialing phone numbers on cell phones activates key-concordant concepts

"Twisting fingers": The case for interactivity in typed language production

Despite the obvious linguistic nature of typing, current psychological models of typing are, to a large extent, divorced from models of spoken language production. This gap has left unanswered many questions regarding the cognitive architecture of typing. In this article we advocate the use of a psycholinguistic framework for studying typing, by showing that such a framework could reveal important similarities and differences between spoken and typed production. Specifically, we investigated the interaction between the lexical and postlexical layers by using a phenomenon known in spoken production as the "repeated-phoneme effect." Participants typed four-word sequences of "finger-twisters" (equivalent to tongue-twisters in spoken production), in which the vowel in the last two words was either repeated (e.g., "fog top") or not (e.g., "fog tip"). We found reliably more migration errors between the consonants of the two typed words when the vowel was repeated, even after the effect of phonology was accounted for. This finding is compatible with an interactive typing system in which postlexical representations send feedback to lexical representations and reveals similar dynamics between spoken and typed production. Additional analyses showed further similarities to spoken production, such as distinct lexical and postlexical error categories, but also revealed that typing errors were much more likely than spoken errors to violate phonotactic constraints. These results provide the first demonstration of feedback between the postlexical and lexical layers in typing, and more generally demonstrate the utility of adopting a psycholinguistic framework tailored specifically to the study of typing.

Moving to Solution

Embodied cognition theories suggest a link between bodily movements and cognitive functions. Given such a link, it is assumed that movement influences the two main stages of problem solving: creating a problem space and creating solutions. This study explores how specific the link between bodily movements and the problem-solving process is. Seventy-two participants were tested with variations of the two-string problem (Experiment 1) and the water-jar problem (Experiment 2), allowing for two possible solutions. In Experiment 1 participants were primed with arm-swing movements (swing group) and step movements on a chair (step group). In Experiment 2 participants sat in front of three jars with glass marbles and had to sort these marbles from the outer jars to the middle one (plus group) or vice versa (minus group). Results showed more swing-like solutions in the swing group and more step-like solutions in the step group, and more addition solutions in the plus group and more subtraction solutions in the minus group. This specificity of the connection between movement and problem-solving task will allow further experiments to investigate how bodily movements influence the stages of problem solving.

Warmer Hearts, Warmer Rooms

Conceptual representations of warmth have been shown to be related to people’s perceptions of ambient temperature. Based on this premise, we hypothesized that merely thinking about personality traits related to communion (but not agency) influences physical experience of warmth. Specifically, the three studies revealed that (a) perceptions of temperature are influenced by both positive and negative attributes within the communion but not agency dimension, (b) the effect is stronger when traits indicate sociability rather than morality subdimension of communion, and (c) communion activation affects temperature perceptions independently of target’s or self-perceptions.

Turning the Hands of Time

The omnipresent abstract symbol for time progression and regression is clockwise versus counterclockwise rotation. It was tested whether merely executing and seeing clockwise (vs. counterclockwise) movements would induce psychological states of temporal progression (vs. regression) and according to motivational orientations toward the future and novelty (vs. the past and familiarity). Supporting this hypothesis, participants who turned cranks counterclockwise preferred familiar over novel stimuli, but participants who turned cranks clockwise preferred novel over old stimuli, reversing the classic mere exposure effect (Experiment 1). Also, participants rotating a cylinder clockwise reported higher scores in the personality measure openness to experience than participants rotating counterclockwise (Experiment 2). Merely passively watching a rotating square had similar but weaker effects on exposure and openness (Experiment 3). Finally, participants chose more unconventional candies from a clockwise than from a counterclockwise Lazy Susan, that is, a turntable (Experiment 4).

How learning to shake a rattle affects 8-month-old infants' perception of the rattle's sound: electrophysiological evidence for action-effect binding in infancy

Bidirectional action-effect associations play a fundamental role in intentional action control and the development of the mirror neuron system. However, it has been questioned if infants are able to acquire bidirectional action-effect associations (i.e., are able to intentionally control their actions). To investigate this, we trained 8-month-old infants for one week to use a novel rattle that produced a specific sound when shaken. Infants were also presented with another sound, which was not related to an action. Thereafter, infants' EEG responses to these two sounds and to an additional, unfamiliar sound were recorded. Infants displayed a stronger mu-desynchronization above cortical motor sites (i.e., motor resonance) when listening to the action-related sound than when hearing other sounds. Our results provide therefore electrophysiological evidence that infants as young as 8 months are able to acquire bidirectional action-effect associations and parallel findings of audiovisual mirror neurons in the monkey brain.