Extensions of the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms

Construct Validation of the Verb Naming Test for Aphasia

PURPOSE

Although there is widespread agreement pertaining to the cognitive processes underlying spoken word production, more generally in aphasia, multiple competing accounts exist regarding the processes involved for verb production, specifically. Some have speculated that suboptimal control of certain item properties (e.g., imageability) may be partially responsible for conflicting reports in the literature, yet there remains a dearth of research on the psychometric validation of verb production tests for aphasia. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the cognitive constructs underlying the Verb Naming Test (VNT), a relatively commonly used verb production test, by expanding upon an item response theory (IRT) modeling framework we previously described.

METHOD

Using an archival data set of 107 individuals with aphasia, we specified a series of IRT models to investigate whether item covariates (argument structure, imageability), person covariates (aphasia subtype, severity), and their interactions were predictive of VNT item response patterns.

RESULTS

Across all models, covariates that were most strongly associated with lexical-semantic processing (imageability, aphasia severity) were significant predictors. In contrast, covariates that were most strongly associated with morphosyntactic processing (argument structure, aphasia subtype) were minimally predictive.

CONCLUSIONS

VNT item response patterns appear to be primarily explained by covariates representing lexical-semantic processing. In particular, we identified an important role of imageability, a covariate not controlled for in the VNT's item design, which both aligns with a body of prior research and further illustrates the challenge of differentiating morphosyntactic processing from lexical and semantic processes during word production.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28664669.

Neural correlates of reading aloud on the autism spectrum

Individuals with autism can show intact decoding (i.e., ability to recognize and pronounce written words accurately). However, reading comprehension (i.e., ability to infer meaning from written text) in autistic individuals is often lower than expected based on age or grade level. Having intact decoding skills despite potentially atypical reading comprehension suggests altered reading pathways in autism, particularly when processing semantics (i.e., word meaning). To test for neural differences in word processing between autistic and non-autistic younger adults, we examined behavioral and neural responses to reading aloud words and pronounceable nonsense words (pseudowords). Additionally, we manipulated word imageability, word frequency, and word and pseudoword spelling-sound consistency as probes for different components (i.e., orthography, phonology and semantics) of the reading system. Behaviorally, the autistic group had a greater reduction in reaction time as word imageability increased. Neurally, pseudoword consistency effects, a probe of spelling-sound mappings without semantics, were only observed in the autistic group, where increased consistency was associated with decreased activity in bilateral intraparietal sulcus. Also compared to the non-autistic group, the autistic group showed greater effects of word consistency, where increasing word consistency was associated with increasing activation in the bilateral posterior superior temporal gyrus and ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Finally, the autistic group showed stronger effects of pseudoword consistency than the non-autistic group, that is increasing pseudoword consistency was associated with decreasing activation in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Together, these results point to differences in how neural resources are used for reading, with more bilateral areas recruited during spelling-sound decoding in autistics to achieve comparable performance to non-autistics.

Direct access to specific autobiographical memories is lower in healthy middle-aged to older adult Apolipoprotein E ε4 carriers compared to non-carriers

Recent research suggests that the retrieval of autobiographical memories among cognitively healthy middle-aged and older adults is sensitive to the Apolipoprotein E ε4 (APOE4) allele, a genetic marker that increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. However, whether the APOE4-associated alteration in autobiographical memory retrieval encompasses rapid (i.e. direct retrieval) or iterative (i.e. generative retrieval) processes remains unclear. In the present study, 39 APOE4 carriers and 45 non-carriers (ages 60-80) who scored within normal limits on neuropsychological testing were cued to generate specific autobiographical events. We examined group differences in direct and generative retrieval and correlated direct and generative retrieval rates with performance on neuropsychological tests. Direct retrieval rates were lower in the APOE4 carriers compared to non-carriers. Episodic memory positively correlated with direct retrieval rates across the sample, though this relationship became non-significant when factoring in age and sex. There were no significant findings related to successful generative retrieval rates and its efficiency. In summary, compared to non-carriers, cognitively unimpaired middle-aged to older adult APOE4 carriers demonstrated greater difficulty, rapidly reconstructing specific autobiographical events without the support of semantic memory, suggesting that early autobiographical memory retrieval processes demonstrate vulnerability to AD-related risk factors.

Moving beyond word frequency based on tally counting: AI-generated familiarity estimates of words and phrases are an interesting additional index of language knowledge

This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to estimate the familiarity of words and multi-word expressions (MWEs). We validated LLM estimates for isolated words using existing human familiarity ratings and found strong correlations. LLM familiarity estimates performed even better in predicting lexical decision and naming performance in megastudies than the best available word frequency measures. We then applied LLM estimates to MWEs, also finding their effectiveness in measuring familiarity for these expressions. We have created a list of more than 400,000 English words and MWEs with LLM-generated familiarity estimates, which we hope will be a valuable resource for researchers. There is also a cleaned-up list of nearly 150,000 entries, excluding lesser-known stimuli, to streamline stimulus selection. Our findings highlight the advantages of LLM-based familiarity estimates, including their better performance than traditional word frequency measures (particularly for predicting word recognition accuracy), their ability to generalize to MWEs, availability for large lists of words, and ease of obtaining new estimates for all types of stimuli.

A novel scoring protocol reveals age-related differences in abstract compared to concrete thinking in cued autobiographical remembering

Human imagination has garnered growing interest in many fields. However, it remains unclear how to characterize different forms of imaginative thinking and how imagination differs between young and older adults. Here, we introduce a novel scoring protocol based on recent theoretical developments in the cognitive neuroscience of imagination to provide a broad tool with which to characterize imaginative thinking. The scoring protocol distinguishes between concrete/perceptual forms of imagination termed the "mind's eye" and abstract/reflective forms of imagination termed the "mind's mind." The protocol also captures whether thoughts pertain to the self, others, or both. We applied this scoring protocol with high inter-rater reliability across two studies involving distinct participants and narrative-based imagination tasks. When compared to young adults, older adults showed a bias toward general content, which is a feature of the mind's mind form of thinking while describing aloud their memories of specific, past events (Study 1). Further, older adults made fewer references to the self. In a separate study of only older adults (Study 2), increasing age was not associated with a bias toward the mind's mind while describing specific past or future events. These results reveal that imaginative thinking can be characterized within the Mind's Eye Mind's Mind framework, with implications for understanding cognitively normal older age.

Targeting Phonology or Semantics to Improve Reading Aloud Response Times and Accuracy: A Case Series Investigation of Stroke Survivors With Aphasia

PURPOSE

Acquired reading deficits, or alexia, affect a significant proportion of individuals with aphasia. We sought to improve treatment for alexia by targeting specific cognitive information-processing components critical to reading (i.e., phonology or semantics).

METHOD

To target either phonological or semantic processing, we administered two anomia treatments, phonomotor treatment (PMT) and semantic feature analysis, modified to include a focus on reading throughout the therapy. Chronic left-hemisphere stroke survivors (N = 5) completed one or two 60-hr treatment rounds. Based on predictions from a computational reading model, three participants received the treatment recommended for their specific reading challenges (e.g., PMT for phonological deficits), while two participants had the nonrecommended treatment first, followed by the recommended model-matched treatment. Changes in reading aloud accuracy and response times (RTs) from before to after treatment were examined as a function of matching treatment to the deficit profile, type of treatment, therapy round, and word characteristics.

RESULTS

Participants' reading aloud accuracy improved after treatment relative to baseline with higher accuracy for high-frequency words and shorter words. After the first treatment round, participants' accuracy and RT improved, irrespective of whether treatment was matched to the deficit profile. Furthermore, participants who completed the second treatment round continued achieving accuracy gains. Following treatment, participants demonstrated enhanced reading efficiency and generalized improvements on the selected sections of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test.

CONCLUSIONS

While larger studies are needed to test for the effects of matching treatment type to the deficit profile, we conclude that treatments targeting specific information-processing components can effectively improve reading. Doubling the treatment dose offers small but significant gains.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26517319.

LexArabic: A receptive vocabulary size test to estimate Arabic proficiency

Arabic is understudied in second-language research (L2) and lacks rapid and adequate tools for measuring proficiency. Drawing inspiration from LexTALE and its extensions, this study created and validated a quick receptive vocabulary size test to estimate L2 Arabic proficiency. In Experiment 1, the initial version of LexArabic was designed and evaluated with 192 L1 and L2 speakers. Item analysis using point-biserial correlations and item response theory (IRT) was conducted to refine the test, resulting in a final version with 90 items (60 words, 30 nonwords). Experiment 2 assessed LexArabic reliability, validity, and accuracy using a new group of 260 L1 and L2 speakers. The validity of LexArabic was evaluated through objective tasks (a general Arabic proficiency test, L1 to L2 translation task, L2 to L1 translation task) as well as subjective tasks (self-rated proficiency). Results showed that LexArabic demonstrated good reliability (α > 90), validity (correlation with two objective tasks and one subjective task), as well as accuracy (AUC value = .88). The introduction of LexArabic has the potential to facilitate experimental research on both L1 and L2 Arabic speakers and contributes to the development of standardized L2 proficiency assessment across languages.

On second thoughts: Testing the underlying mechanisms of spontaneous future thought

The human capacity to imagine possible future events unintentionally, with minimal cognitive effort, is termed spontaneous future thought (SFT). This paper addresses an important theoretical question for cognitive science: What are the possible cognitive mechanisms underlying such SFT experiences? We contrasted three hypotheses present in the literature: the online construction hypothesis, the recasting hypothesis, and the memories of future thoughts hypothesis. Study 1 (N = 41) used novel subjective ratings which challenged the recasting mechanism: SFTs were mostly rated as dissimilar to autobiographical memories, suggesting they are not simply past experiences 'recast' as future events. Study 2 (N = 90) used a novel experimental paradigm, comparing effects of voluntary episodic future constructions and non-personal narratives upon subsequent spontaneous thought sampling. Results suggested that voluntary future constructions remain accessible to spontaneous retrieval, supporting the memories of future thoughts hypothesis. This finding, and other data presented across the two studies, still indicates a role for online construction processes in SFT, but further empirical work is needed to clarify how and when constructive processes are engaged in SFT. Taken together, these two studies represent initial efforts to elucidate the mechanisms underlying SFT, providing the first proof-of-principle that deliberately envisioned future events can reappear, without intention, in consciousness at some later time, and further supporting the dual process account of future thinking. These methods and findings provide a firm basis for subsequent experimental and longitudinal research on SFT.

Stricker Learning Span criterion validity: a remote self-administered multi-device compatible digital word list memory measure shows similar ability to differentiate amyloid and tau PET-defined biomarker groups as in-person Auditory Verbal Learning Test

OBJECTIVE

The Stricker Learning Span (SLS) is a computer-adaptive digital word list memory test specifically designed for remote assessment and self-administration on a web-based multi-device platform (Mayo Test Drive). We aimed to establish criterion validity of the SLS by comparing its ability to differentiate biomarker-defined groups to the person-administered Rey's Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT).

METHOD

Participants (N = 353; mean age = 71, SD = 11; 93% cognitively unimpaired [CU]) completed the AVLT during an in-person visit, the SLS remotely (within 3 months) and had brain amyloid and tau PET scans available (within 3 years). Overlapping groups were formed for 1) those on the Alzheimer's disease (AD) continuum (amyloid PET positive, A+, n = 125) or not (A-, n = 228), and those with biological AD (amyloid and tau PET positive, A+T+, n = 55) vs no evidence of AD pathology (A-T-, n = 195). Analyses were repeated among CU participants only.

RESULTS

The SLS and AVLT showed similar ability to differentiate biomarker-defined groups when comparing AUROCs (p's > .05). In logistic regression models, SLS contributed significantly to predicting biomarker group beyond age, education, and sex, including when limited to CU participants. Medium (A- vs A+) to large (A-T- vs A+T+) unadjusted effect sizes were observed for both SLS and AVLT. Learning and delay variables were similar in terms of ability to separate biomarker groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Remotely administered SLS performed similarly to in-person-administered AVLT in its ability to separate biomarker-defined groups, providing evidence of criterion validity. Results suggest the SLS may be sensitive to detecting subtle objective cognitive decline in preclinical AD.

Neural substrates of specific and general autobiographical memory retrieval in younger and older adults

Healthy aging is associated with a shift away from the retrieval of specific episodic autobiographical memories (AMs), towards more general and semanticized memories. Younger adults modulate activity in the default mode network according to the episodic specificity of AM retrieval. However, little is known about whether aging disrupts this neural modulation. In the current study we examine age-related changes in the modulation of whole-brain networks in response to three tasks falling along a gradient of episodic specificity. Younger and older adults retrieved specific (unique) AMs, general (routine) AMs, and semantic (general knowledge) memories. We found that both younger and older adults modulated default mode regions in response to varying episodic specificity. In addition, younger adults upregulated activity in several default mode regions with increasing episodic specificity, while older adults either did not modulate these regions, or downregulated activity in these regions. In contrast, older adults upregulated activity in the left temporal pole for tasks with higher episodic specificity. These brain activation patterns converge with prior findings that specific AMs are diminished in episodic richness with age, but are supplemented with conceptual and general information. Age-related reductions in the modulation of default mode regions might contribute to the shift away from episodic retrieval and towards semantic retrieval, resulting in reduced episodic specificity of personal memories.

Semantic gender: Norms for 24,000 Dutch words and its role in word meaning

Semantic gender norms are presented for 24,037 Dutch words. Eighty participants rated 6017 words each on a five-point Likert scale ranging from feminine to masculine. Each word was rated by ten male and ten female participants. The collected norms show high reliability and correlate well with similar norms in English. We show that semantic gender is distinct from other lexical dimensions such as valence, arousal, dominance, concreteness, and age of acquisition. Semantic gender is not the same as the grammatical gender of words, either. The collected norms can be predicted accurately using a semantic space based on word association data. A dimension explaining a good amount of variance is present in this space, indicating that semantic gender is an important component of the human meaning system.

SCOPE: The South Carolina psycholinguistic metabase

The number of databases that provide various measurements of lexical properties for psycholinguistic research has increased rapidly in recent years. The proliferation of lexical variables, and the multitude of associated databases, makes the choice, comparison, and standardization of these variables in psycholinguistic research increasingly difficult. Here, we introduce The South Carolina Psycholinguistic Metabase (SCOPE), which is a metabase (or a meta-database) containing an extensive, curated collection of psycholinguistic variable values from major databases. The metabase currently contains 245 lexical variables, organized into seven major categories: General (e.g., frequency), Orthographic (e.g., bigram frequency), Phonological (e.g., phonological uniqueness point), Orth-Phon (e.g., consistency), Semantic (e.g., concreteness), Morphological (e.g., number of morphemes), and Response variables (e.g., lexical decision latency). We hope that SCOPE will become a valuable resource for researchers in psycholinguistics and affiliated disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience of language, computational linguistics, and communication disorders. The availability and ease of use of the metabase with comprehensive set of variables can facilitate the understanding of the unique contribution of each of the variables to word processing, and that of interactions between variables, as well as new insights and development of improved models and theories of word processing. It can also help standardize practice in psycholinguistics. We demonstrate use of the metabase by measuring relationships between variables in multiple ways and testing their individual contribution towards a number of dependent measures, in the most comprehensive analysis of this kind to date. The metabase is freely available at go.sc.edu/scope.

Linguistic and emotional responses evoked by pseudoword presentation: An EEG and behavioral study

When the semantic properties of words are turned off, such as in pseudowords, the grammatical properties of the stimuli indicated through suffixes may provide cues to the meaning. The application of electroencephalography (EEG), combined with the pseudoword paradigm, allows for evaluating the effects of verbs and nouns as linguistic categories within the time course of processing. To contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the functional processing of words from different grammatical classes, we conducted an EEG experiment, followed by a behavioral lexical decision task (LDT). The EEG and LDT indicated different neural and behavioral reactions to the presented grammar classes, allowing for a deeper understanding of the neuro- and psycholinguistic dimensions of grammar.

Boys don't cry (or kiss or dance): A computational linguistic lens into gendered actions in film

Contemporary media is full of images that reflect traditional gender notions and stereotypes, some of which may perpetuate harmful gender representations. In an effort to highlight the occurrence of these adverse portrayals, researchers have proposed machine-learning methods to identify stereotypes in the language patterns found in character dialogues. However, not all of the harmful stereotypes are communicated just through dialogue. As a complementary approach, we present a large-scale machine-learning framework that automatically identifies character's actions from scene descriptions found in movie scripts. For this work, we collected 1.2+ million scene descriptions from 912 movie scripts, with more than 50 thousand actions and 20 thousand movie characters. Our framework allow us to study systematic gender differences in movie portrayals at a scale. We show this through a series of statistical analyses that highlight differences in gender portrayals. Our findings provide further evidence to claims from prior media studies including: (i) male characters display higher agency than female characters; (ii) female actors are more frequently the subject of gaze, and (iii) male characters are less likely to display affection. We hope that these data resources and findings help raise awareness on portrayals of character actions that reflect harmful gender stereotypes, and demonstrate novel possibilities for computational approaches in media analysis.

Perceptual richness of words and its role in free and cued recall

This research aimed to clarify the role of the perceptual richness of words (PR) in the recall tasks. PR was operationalized as the number of sensory modalities through which an object can be perceived. Previously, we found that concepts experienced with many modalities (dog) were recalled more accurately in cued recall than those perceived with few modalities (rainbow) and abstract words. This finding fitted the Perceptual symbol system theory (PSST) and the Dual coding theory (DCT) predictions. We tested the PR effect in both cued (experiment 1- E1) and free recall tasks (experiment 2 – E2) in the present study. With careful stimuli manipulation of context availability and emotional valence and statistical control of arousal and relatedness, made to exclude their influence on recall, we tested alternative explanations of the concreteness effect offered by the relational-distinctiveness hypothesis. The additional perceptual codes improved recall accuracy in the cued recall task (E1), which was in line with the PSST and the DCT. This conclusion is straightforward: two critical groups of concrete words were matched for concreteness and visual perceptual strength. Thus, more accurate recall of concepts experienced with many modalities can be attributed to richer perceptual experience. However, the relational information was essential for recall accuracy in the free recall task (E2), as hypothesized by the relational-distinctiveness hypothesis.

Memories with a blind mind: Remembering the past and imagining the future with aphantasia

Our capacity to re-experience the past and simulate the future is thought to depend heavily on visual imagery, which allows us to construct complex sensory representations in the absence of sensory stimulation. There are large individual differences in visual imagery ability, but their impact on autobiographical memory and future prospection remains poorly understood. Research in this field assumes the normative use of visual imagery as a cognitive tool to simulate the past and future, however some individuals lack the ability to visualise altogether (a condition termed "aphantasia"). Aphantasia represents a rare and naturally occurring knock-out model for examining the role of visual imagery in episodic memory recall. Here, we assessed individuals with aphantasia on an adapted form of the Autobiographical Interview, a behavioural measure of the specificity and richness of episodic details underpinning the memory of events. Aphantasic participants generated significantly fewer episodic details than controls for both past and future events. This effect was most pronounced for novel future events, driven by selective reductions in visual detail retrieval, accompanied by comparatively reduced ratings of the phenomenological richness of simulated events, and paralleled by quantitative linguistic markers of reduced perceptual language use in aphantasic participants compared to those with visual imagery. Our findings represent the first systematic evidence (using combined objective and subjective data streams) that aphantasia is associated with a diminished ability to re-experience the past and simulate the future, indicating that visual imagery is an important cognitive tool for the dynamic retrieval and recombination of episodic details during mental simulation.

Bilinear pooling in video-QA: empirical challenges and motivational drift from neurological parallels

Bilinear pooling (BLP) refers to a family of operations recently developed for fusing features from different modalities predominantly for visual question answering (VQA) models. Successive BLP techniques have yielded higher performance with lower computational expense, yet at the same time they have drifted further from the original motivational justification of bilinear models, instead becoming empirically motivated by task performance. Furthermore, despite significant success in text-image fusion in VQA, BLP has not yet gained such notoriety in video question answering (video-QA). Though BLP methods have continued to perform well on video tasks when fusing vision and non-textual features, BLP has recently been overshadowed by other vision and textual feature fusion techniques in video-QA. We aim to add a new perspective to the empirical and motivational drift in BLP. We take a step back and discuss the motivational origins of BLP, highlighting the often-overlooked parallels to neurological theories (Dual Coding Theory and The Two-Stream Model of Vision). We seek to carefully and experimentally ascertain the empirical strengths and limitations of BLP as a multimodal text-vision fusion technique in video-QA using two models (TVQA baseline and heterogeneous-memory-enchanced 'HME' model) and four datasets (TVQA, TGif-QA, MSVD-QA, and EgoVQA). We examine the impact of both simply replacing feature concatenation in the existing models with BLP, and a modified version of the TVQA baseline to accommodate BLP that we name the 'dual-stream' model. We find that our relatively simple integration of BLP does not increase, and mostly harms, performance on these video-QA benchmarks. Using our insights on recent work in BLP for video-QA results and recently proposed theoretical multimodal fusion taxonomies, we offer insight into why BLP-driven performance gain for video-QA benchmarks may be more difficult to achieve than in earlier VQA models. We share our perspective on, and suggest solutions for, the key issues we identify with BLP techniques for multimodal fusion in video-QA. We look beyond the empirical justification of BLP techniques and propose both alternatives and improvements to multimodal fusion by drawing neurological inspiration from Dual Coding Theory and the Two-Stream Model of Vision. We qualitatively highlight the potential for neurological inspirations in video-QA by identifying the relative abundance of psycholinguistically 'concrete' words in the vocabularies for each of the text components (e.g., questions and answers) of the four video-QA datasets we experiment with.

A novel computer adaptive word list memory test optimized for remote assessment: Psychometric properties and associations with neurodegenerative biomarkers in older women without dementia

Introduction

This study established the psychometric properties and preliminary validity of the Stricker Learning Span (SLS), a novel computer adaptive word list memory test designed for remote assessment and optimized for smartphone use.

Methods

Women enrolled in the Mayo Clinic Specialized Center of Research Excellence (SCORE) were recruited via e-mail or phone to complete two remote cognitive testing sessions. Convergent validity was assessed through correlation with previously administered in-person neuropsychological tests (n = 96, ages 55-79) and criterion validity through associations with magnetic resonance imaging measures of neurodegeneration sensitive to Alzheimer's disease (n = 47).

Results

SLS performance significantly correlated with the Auditory Verbal Learning Test and measures of neurodegeneration (temporal meta-regions of interest and entorhinal cortical thickness, adjusting for age and education). Test-retest reliabilities across two sessions were 0.71-0.76 (two-way mixed intraclass correlation coefficients).

Discussion

The SLS is a valid and reliable self-administered memory test that shows promise for remote assessment of aging and neurodegenerative disorders.

Analyzing the structure of animacy: Exploring relationships among six new animacy and 15 existing normative dimensions for 1,200 concrete nouns

Animacy is an important word variable (especially for episodic memory), yet no norms exist in the literature. We present a complete, usable normative data set of 1,200 relatively concrete nouns normed on 15 existing dimensions (concreteness, familiarity, imagery, availability, valence, arousal, dominance, age of acquisition, length, orthographic neighborhood, phonographic neighborhood, number of syllables, and subtitle frequency/contextual diversity) and six new animacy dimensions (a general living/non-living scale, ability to think, ability to reproduce, similarity to a person, goal-directedness, and movement likelihood). Principal component analysis of these 21 dimensions revealed that animacy scales were conceptually different from extant word variables. Further, factor analysis of the six new scales revealed these animacy norms may be separable into two dimensions: a "Mental" component related to animates' ability to think and have goals, and a "Physical" component related to animates' general resemblance to living things. These data provide useful theoretical insight into the structure of the animacy dimension, an important factor in many cognitive processes. The norms are accessible at https://osf.io/4t3cu .

Remembering spatial words: Sensorimotor simulation affects verbal recognition memory

Previous evidence shows that words with implicit spatial meaning or metaphorical spatial associations are perceptually simulated and can guide attention to associated locations (e.g., bird-upward location). In turn, simulated representations interfere with visual perception at an associated location. The present study investigates the effect of spatial associations on short-term verbal recognition memory to disambiguate between modal and amodal accounts of spatial interference effects across two experiments. Participants in both experiments encoded words presented in congruent and incongruent locations. Congruent and incongruent locations were based on an independent norming task. In Experiment 1, an auditorily presented word probed participants' memory as they were visually cued to either the original location of the probe word or a diagonal location at retrieval. In Experiment 2, there was no cue at retrieval but a neutral encoding condition in which words normed to central locations were shown. Results show that spatial associations affected memory performance although spatial information was neither relevant nor necessary for successful retrieval: Words in Experiment 1 were retrieved more accurately when there was a visual cue in the congruent location at retrieval but only if they were encoded in a non-canonical position. A visual cue in the congruent location slowed down memory performance when retrieving highly imageable words. With no cue at retrieval (Experiment 2), participants were better at remembering spatially congruent words as opposed to neutral words. Results provide evidence in support of sensorimotor simulation in verbal memory and a perceptual competition account of spatial interference effect.

Visual perspective as a two-dimensional construct in episodic future thought

Visual perspective (first-person vs. third-person) is a salient characteristic of memory and mental imagery with important cognitive and behavioural consequences. Most work on visual perspective treats it as a unidimensional construct. However, third-person perspective can have opposite effects on emotion and motivation, sometimes intensifying these and other times acting as a distancing mechanism, as in PTSD. For this reason among others, we propose that visual perspective in memory and mental imagery is best understood as varying along two dimensions: first, the degree to which first-person perspective predominates in the episodic imagery, and second, the degree to which the self is visually salient from a third-person perspective. We show that, in episodic future thinking, these are anticorrelated but non-redundant. These results further our basic understanding of the potent but divergent effects visual perspective has on emotion and motivation, both in everyday life and in psychiatric conditions.

How well imageability, concreteness, perceptual strength, and action strength predict recognition memory, lexical decision, and reading aloud performance

We examined how well imageability, concreteness, perceptual strength, and action strength predicted recognition memory, lexical decision, and reading aloud performance. We used our imageability estimates [Cortese, M. J., & Fugett, A. (2004). Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words. Behavior Methods and Research, Instrumentation, & Computers, 36(3), 384-387. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195585; Schock, J., Cortese, M. J., & Khanna, M. M. (2012a). Imageability ratings for 3,000 disyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 374-379. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0162-0], concreteness norms of Brysbaert and colleagues [Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B., & Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 46(3), 904-911. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5], and perceptual and action strength ratings of Lynott and colleagues [Lynott, D., Connell, L., Brysbaert, M., Brand, J., & Carney, J. (2020). The lancaster sensorimotor norms: Multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 52(3), 1271-1291. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z]. Our results indicate imageability is the best predictor, but methodological differences between ratings studies may contribute to the results. Surprisingly, action strength was negatively (albeit weakly) related to recognition memory. Analyses of item zRTs from the English lexicon project indicate these variables were not strong predictors of reading aloud or lexical decision performance. However, there is a small, consistent positive relationship between concreteness and zRTs (i.e., a facilitative abstractness effect). We believe researchers should either employ or control for imageability rather than concreteness, perceptual strength, or action strength when conducting recognition memory experiments. In addition, image-based codes generated at encoding strengthen memory traces but do not provide major inputs into reading aloud and lexical decision processes. Also, the facilitative abstractness effect on lexical decision and reading aloud zRTs may reflect more robust lexical representations for abstract words than concrete words, and that these two constructs are distinct.

The multidimensionality of abstract concepts: A systematic review

The neuroscientific study of conceptual representation has largely focused on categories of concrete entities (biological entities, tools…), while abstract knowledge has been less extensively investigated. The possible presence of a categorical organization of abstract knowledge is a debated issue. An embodied cognition framework predicts an organization of the abstract domain into different dimensions, grounded in the brain regions engaged by the corresponding experience. Here we review the types of experience that have been proposed to characterize different categories of abstract concepts, and the evidence supporting a corresponding organization derived from behavioural, neuroimaging (i.e., fMRI, MRI, PET, SPECT), EEG, and neurostimulation (i.e., TMS) studies in healthy and clinical populations. The available data provide substantial converging evidence in favour of the presence of distinct neural representations of social and emotional knowledge, mental states and magnitude concepts, engaging brain systems involved in the corresponding experiences. This evidence is supporting an extension of embodied models of semantic memory organization to several types of abstract knowledge.

Future and past autobiographical memory in persons with HIV disease

Objective: While HIV disease is associated with impairment in declarative memory, the ability of people with HIV (PWH) to describe past and future autobiographical events is not known. Method: Participants included 63 PWH and 28 seronegative individuals ages 50-78 who completed standardized neurocognitive and everyday functioning assessments. Participants described four events from the recent past and four imagined events in the near future, details from which were classified as internal or external to the main event. Result: PWH produced fewer autobiographical details with small-to-medium effect sizes but did not differ from seronegative participants in meta-cognitive ratings of their performance. Performance of the study groups did not vary across past or future probes or internal versus external details; however, within the entire sample, past events were described in greater detail than future events, and more external than internal details were produced. Within the PWH group, the production of fewer internal details for future events was moderately associated with poorer prospective memory, executive dysfunction, and errors on a laboratory-based task of medication management. Conclusion: Older PWH may experience difficulty generating autobiographical details from the past and simulated events in the future, which may be related to executive dyscontrol of memory processes. Future studies might examine the role of future thinking in health behaviors such as medication adherence and retention in healthcare among PWH. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

LexOPS: An R package and user interface for the controlled generation of word stimuli

LexOPS is an R package and user interface designed to facilitate the generation of word stimuli for use in research. Notably, the tool permits the generation of suitably controlled word lists for any user-specified factorial design and can be adapted for use with any language. It features an intuitive graphical user interface, including the visualization of both the distributions within and relationships among variables of interest. An inbuilt database of English words is also provided, including a range of lexical variables commonly used in psycholinguistic research. This article introduces LexOPS, outlining the features of the package and detailing the sources of the inbuilt dataset. We also report a validation analysis, showing that, in comparison to stimuli of existing studies, stimuli optimized with LexOPS generally demonstrate greater constraint and consistency in variable manipulation and control. Current instructions for installing and using LexOPS are available at https://JackEdTaylor.github.io/LexOPSdocs/.

The Relationship between Psycholinguistic Features of Religious Words and Core Dimensions of Religiosity: A Survey Study with Japanese Participants

Previous studies have reported that religious words and religiosity affect mental processes and behaviors. However, it is unclear what psycholinguistic features of religious words (e.g., familiarity, imageability, and emotional aspects) are associated with each dimension of personal religiosity (intellect, ideology, public practice, private practice, and experience). The purpose of this study was to examine whether and how the above-mentioned psycholinguistic features of religious words correlate with each of the core dimensions of religiosity. Japanese participants evaluated four psycholinguistic features of twelve religious words using a 5-point Semantic Differential scale for familiarity and imageability and a 9-point Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale for emotional valence and emotional arousal. The participants also rated their own religiosity using the Japanese version of the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (JCRS). The results of the study revealed that (1) the scales measuring the psycholinguistic features of religious words were statistically reliable; (2) the JCRS was reliable; (3) the familiarity, emotional valence, and emotional arousal of religious words and each mean dimensional score of the JCRS score correlated positively with each other; and (4) highly religious people had higher familiarity and higher emotional arousal to religious words than non-religious people, whereas highly religious people had higher emotional valence to religious words in comparison with non-religious and religious people. In addition, religious people had higher familiarity to religious words than non-religious people. Taken together, these findings suggest that psycholinguistic features of religious words contribute to the detection of religiosity.

Lexicosemantic, affective, and distributional norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives

The research of the word is still very much the research of the noun. Adjectives have been largely overlooked, despite being the second-largest word class in many languages and serving an important communicative function, because of the rich, nuanced qualifications they afford. Adjectives are also ideally suited to study the interface between cognition and emotion, as they naturally cover the entire range of lexicosemantic variables such as imageability (infinite-green), and affective variables such as valence (sad-happy). We illustrate this by showing how the centrality of words in the mental lexicon varies as a function of the words' affective dimensions, using newly collected norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives. The norms include the lexicosemantic variables age of acquisition, familiarity, concreteness, and imageability; the affective variables valence, arousal, and dominance; and a variety of distributional variables, including network statistics resulting from a large-scale word association study. The norms are freely available from https://osf.io/nyg8v/, for researchers studying adjectives specifically or for whom adjectives constitute convenient stimuli to study other topics, such as vagueness, inference, spatial cognition, or affective word processing.

Altering access to autobiographical episodes with prior semantic knowledge

Within autobiographical knowledge, semantic and episodic memory are traditionally considered separate, but newer models place them along a continuum, which raises the possibility of an intermediate form of knowledge - personal semantics. This study tested how different types of semantics - general semantics and two forms of personal semantics - impact access to personal episodic memories. In two experiments, participants made a series of true/false judgments about a prime statement, which reflected a general semantic fact, a context-dependent (e.g., repeated event) or context-independent (e.g., trait), personal semantic fact and then retrieved a specific past episodic memory. There was a significantly stronger priming effect for accessing specific episodic memories after judging personal semantic facts versus general facts. We also found that context-dependent and -independent personal semantic facts had separable priming effects on episodic memory. These findings support a continuum model of memory and verifies that there are multiple forms of personal knowledge.

Searching for the past: Exploring the dynamics of direct and generative autobiographical memory reconstruction among young and cognitively normal older adults

Episodic autobiographical memories (EAMs) can come to mind through two retrieval routes, one direct (i.e., an EAM is retrieved almost instantaneously) and the other generative (i.e., by using autobiographical/general knowledge to cue an EAM). It is well established that normal cognitive aging is associated with a reduction in the retrieval of EAMs, but the contributions of direct or generative reconstruction to the age-related shift toward general memories remain unknown. Prior studies also have not clarified whether similar cognitive mechanisms facilitate the ability to successfully reconstruct EAMs and elaborate them in event-specific detail. To address these gaps in knowledge, young and older participants were asked to reconstruct EAMs using a "think-aloud" paradigm and then describe in detail a subset of retrieved memories. An adapted scoring procedure was implemented to categorize memories accessed during reconstruction, and the Autobiographical Interview (AI) scoring procedure was utilized for elaboration scoring. Results indicated that in comparison with young adults, older adults not only engaged in direct retrieval less often than young adults but they also more often ended generative retrieval at general events instead of EAMs. The ability to elaborate EAMs with internal details was positively associated with the ability to use generative retrieval to reconstruct EAMs in both young and older adults, but there was no relationship between internal detail elaboration and direct retrieval in either age group. Taken together, these results indicate age-related differences in direct and generative retrieval contribute to overgeneral autobiographical memory and they support a connection between generative retrieval and elaboration.

Age-related changes in repetition suppression of neural activity during emotional future simulation

Despite advances in understanding the consequences of age-related episodic memory decline for future simulation, much remains unknown regarding changes in the neural underpinnings of future thinking with age. We used a repetition suppression paradigm to explore age-related changes in the neural correlates of emotional future simulation. Younger and older adults simulated positive, negative, and neutral future events either 2 or 5 times. Reductions in neural activity for events simulated 5 versus 2 times (i.e., repetition suppression) identify brain regions responsive to the specific emotion of simulated events. Critically, older adults showed greater repetition suppression than younger adults in the temporal pole for negative simulations, and the cuneus for positive simulations. These findings suggest that older adults distance themselves from negative future possibilities by thinking about them in a more semantic way, consistent with the view that older adults down-regulate negative affect and up-regulate positive affect. More broadly this study increases our understanding of the impact of aging on the neural underpinnings of episodic future simulation.

Finding categories through words: More nameable features improve category learning

What are the cognitive consequences of having a name for something? Having a word for a feature makes it easier to communicate about a set of exemplars belonging to the same category (e.g., "the red things"). But might it also make it easier to learn the category itself? Here, we provide evidence that the ease of learning category distinctions based on simple visual features is predicted from the ease of naming those features. Across seven experiments, participants learned categories composed of colors or shapes that were either easy or more difficult to name in English. Holding the category structure constant, when the underlying features of the category were easy to name, participants were faster and more accurate in learning the novel category. These results suggest that compact verbal labels may facilitate hypothesis formation during learning: it is easier to pose the hypothesis "it is about redness" than "it is about that pinkish-purplish color". Our results have consequences for understanding how developmental and cross-linguistic differences in a language's vocabulary affect category learning and conceptual development.

The core episodic simulation network dissociates as a function of subjective experience and objective content

Episodic simulation - the mental construction of a possible future event - has been consistently associated with enhanced activity in a set of neural regions referred to as the core network. In the current functional neuroimaging study, we assessed whether members of the core network are differentially associated with the subjective experience of future events (i.e., vividness) versus the objective content comprising those events (i.e., the amount of episodic details). During scanning, participants imagined future events in response to object cues. On each trial, participants rated the subjective vividness associated with each future event. Participants completed a post-scan interview where they viewed each object cue from the scanner and verbally reported whatever they had thought about. For imagined events, we quantified the number of episodic or internal details in accordance with the Autobiographical Interview (i.e., who, what, when, and where details of each central event). To test whether core network regions are differentially associated with subjective experience or objective episodic content, imagined future events were sorted as a function of their rated vividness or the amount of episodic detail. Univariate analyses revealed that some regions of the core network were uniquely sensitive to the vividness of imagined future events, including the hippocampus (i.e., high > low vividness), whereas other regions, such as the lateral parietal cortex, were sensitive to the amount of episodic detail in the event (i.e., high > low episodic details). The present results indicate that members of the core network support distinct episodic simulation-related processes.

The Glasgow Norms: Ratings of 5,500 words on nine scales

The Glasgow Norms are a set of normative ratings for 5,553 English words on nine psycholinguistic dimensions: arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic size, and gender association. The Glasgow Norms are unique in several respects. First, the corpus itself is relatively large, while simultaneously providing norms across a substantial number of lexical dimensions. Second, for any given subset of words, the same participants provided ratings across all nine dimensions (33 participants/word, on average). Third, two novel dimensions—semantic size and gender association—are included. Finally, the corpus contains a set of 379 ambiguous words that are presented either alone (e.g., toast) or with information that selects an alternative sense (e.g., toast (bread), toast (speech)). The relationships between the dimensions of the Glasgow Norms were initially investigated by assessing their correlations. In addition, a principal component analysis revealed four main factors, accounting for 82% of the variance (Visualization, Emotion, Salience, and Exposure). The validity of the Glasgow Norms was established via comparisons of our ratings to 18 different sets of current psycholinguistic norms. The dimension of size was tested with megastudy data, confirming findings from past studies that have explicitly examined this variable. Alternative senses of ambiguous words (i.e., disambiguated forms), when discordant on a given dimension, seemingly led to appropriately distinct ratings. Informal comparisons between the ratings of ambiguous words and of their alternative senses showed different patterns that likely depended on several factors (the number of senses, their relative strengths, and the rating scales themselves). Overall, the Glasgow Norms provide a valuable resource—in particular, for researchers investigating the role of word recognition in language comprehension.

Duality of Function: Activation for Meaningless Nonwords and Semantic Codes in the Same Brain Areas

Studies of the neural substrates of semantic (word meaning) processing have typically focused on semantic manipulations, with less consideration for potential differences in difficulty across conditions. While the idea that particular brain regions can support multiple functions is widely accepted, studies of specific cognitive domains rarely test for co-location with other functions. Here we start with standard univariate analyses comparing words to meaningless nonwords, replicating our recent finding that this contrast can activate task-positive regions for words, and default-mode regions in the putative semantic network for nonwords, pointing to difficulty effects. Critically, this was followed up with a multivariate analysis to test whether the same areas activated for meaningless nonwords contained semantic information sufficient to distinguish high- from low-imageability words. Indeed, this classification was performed reliably better than chance at 75% accuracy. This is compatible with two non-exclusive interpretations. Numerous areas in the default-mode network are task-negative in the sense of activating for less demanding conditions, and the same areas contain information supporting semantic cognition. Therefore, while areas of the default mode network have been hypothesized to support semantic cognition, we offer evidence that these areas can respond to both domain-general difficulty effects, and to specific aspects of semantics.

Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas

We present word prevalence data for 61,858 English words. Word prevalence refers to the number of people who know the word. The measure was obtained on the basis of an online crowdsourcing study involving over 220,000 people. Word prevalence data are useful for gauging the difficulty of words and, as such, for matching stimulus materials in experimental conditions or selecting stimulus materials for vocabulary tests. Word prevalence also predicts word processing times, over and above the effects of word frequency, word length, similarity to other words, and age of acquisition, in line with previous findings in the Dutch language.

Development and public release of the Penn Reading Assessment Computerized Adaptive Test (PRA-CAT) for premorbid IQ

An important component of neuropsychological testing is assessment of premorbid intelligence to estimate a patient's ability independent of neurological impairment. A common test of premorbid IQ-namely, the Reading section of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT)-has been shown to have high measurement error in the high ability range, is unnecessarily long (55 items), and is proprietary. We describe the development of an alternative, nonproprietary, computerized adaptive test for premorbid IQ, the Penn Reading Assessment (PRA-CAT). PRA-CAT items were calibrated using a 1-parameter item response theory model in a large community sample (N = 9,498), Ages 8 to 21, and the resulting parameters were used to simulate computerized adaptive testing sessions. Simulations demonstrated that the PRA-CAT achieves low measurement error (0.25; equivalent to Cronbach's alpha = .94) and acceptable measurement error (0.40; Cronbach's alpha = .84) after only 18 and 6 items, respectively (on average). Correlation of WRAT and PRA-CAT scores with numerous clinical, cognitive, demographic, and neuroimaging criteria suggests that validity of PRA-CAT score interpretation is comparable (and sometimes superior) with the WRAT. The fully functioning PRA-CAT for public use (including item parameter estimates reported here) has been built using the open-source program Concerto, and can be installed by anyone on a local computer or on the "cloud." Given the length and proprietary nature of the WRAT, the PRA-CAT shows promise as a potential alternative (and with minimal or no cost). Further validation in the context of neurological injury is needed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Constructing autobiographical events within a spatial or temporal context: a comparison of two targeted episodic induction techniques

Recalling and imagining autobiographical experiences involves constructing event representations within spatiotemporal contexts. We tested whether generating autobiographical events within a primarily spatial (where the event occurred) or temporal (the sequence of actions that occurred) context affected how the associated mental representation was constructed. We leveraged the well-validated episodic specificity induction (ESI) technique, known to influence the use of episodic processes on subsequent tasks, to develop variants that selectively enhance spatial or temporal processing. We tested the effects of these inductions on the details used to describe past and future autobiographical events. We first replicated the standard ESI effect, showing that ESI enhances generating episodic details, particularly those that are perception-based, when describing autobiographical events (Experiment 1). We then directly compared the effects of the spatial and temporal inductions (Experiment 2 and 3). When describing autobiographical events, spatial induction enhanced generating episodic details, specifically perception-based details, compared to the control or temporal inductions. A greater proportion of the episodic details generated after the temporal induction were gist-based than after the spatial induction, but this proportion did not differ from a control induction. Thus, using a spatial or temporal framework for autobiographical event generation alters the associated details that are accessed.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) selectively modulates semantic information during reading

The left angular gyrus has long been implicated in semantic processing. Here we tested whether or not transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left angular gyrus modulated reading performance. Adult readers (N = 77) (1) read aloud words that varied in degree of imageability, a semantic word property known to activate the angular gyrus, and (2) completed an N-back task (control task). Individuals were randomly assigned to either the anodal, cathodal or sham stimulation conditions. We found that anodal (p = 0.001) and cathodal (p < 0.001) stimulation impacted how imageability facilitates reading times such that readers who showed the largest imageability effects pre-stimulation showed the greatest reduction in these effects post-stimulation. No effects of stimulation were found in the sham group (p > 0.05) or for the control task (i.e., N-back; p > 0.05). These findings indicate that reading pathways can be modulated via brain stimulation (tDCS) to shift individuals' sensitivity to word-level characteristics, namely imageability.

Less imageable words lead to more looks to blank locations during memory retrieval

People revisit spatial locations of visually encoded information when they are asked to retrieve that information, even when the visual image is no longer present. Such “looking at nothing” during retrieval is likely modulated by memory load (i.e., mental effort to maintain and reconstruct information) and the strength of mental representations. We investigated whether words that are more difficult to remember also lead to more looks to relevant, blank locations. Participants were presented four nouns on a two by two grid. A number of lexico-semantic variables were controlled to form high-difficulty and low-difficulty noun sets. Results reveal more frequent looks to blank locations during retrieval of high-difficulty nouns compared to low-difficulty ones. Mixed-effects modelling demonstrates that imagery-related semantic factors (imageability and concreteness) predict looking at nothing during retrieval. Results provide the first direct evidence that looking at nothing is modulated by word difficulty and in particular, word imageability. Overall, the research provides substantial support to the integrated memory account for linguistic stimuli and looking at nothing as a form of mental imagery.

Perceptual Experience Norms for 506 Russian Nouns: Modality Rating, Spatial Localization, Manipulability, Imageability and Other Variables

A number of new psycholinguistic variables has been proposed during the last years within embodied cognition framework: modality experience rating (i.e., relationship between words and images of a particular perceptive modality-visual, auditory, haptic etc.), manipulability (the necessity for an object to interact with human hands in order to perform its function), vertical spatial localization. However, it is not clear how these new variables are related to each other and to such traditional variables as imageability, AoA and word frequency. In this article, normative data on the modality (visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory, and gustatory) ratings, vertical spatial localization of the object, manipulability, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency for 506 Russian nouns are presented. Strongest correlations were observed between olfactory and gustatory modalities (.81), visual modality and imageability (.78), haptic modality and manipulability (.7). Other modalities also significantly correlate with imageability: olfactory (.35), gustatory (.24), and haptic (.67). Factor analysis divided variables into four groups where visual and haptic modality ratings were combined with imageability, manipulability and AoA (the first factor); word length, frequency and AoA formed the second factor; olfactory modality was united with gustatory (the third factor); spatial localization only is included in the fourth factor. Present norms of imageability and AoA are consistent with previous as correlation analysis has revealed. The complete database can be downloaded from supplementary material.

Subjective age-of-acquisition norms for 600 Turkish words from four age groups

The main purpose of this study was to report age-based subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for 600 Turkish words. A total of 115 children, 100 young adults, 115 middle-aged adults, and 127 older adults provided AoA estimates for 600 words on a 7-point scale. The intraclass correlations suggested high reliability, and the AoA estimates were highly correlated across the four age groups. Children gave earlier AoA estimates than the three adult groups; this was true for high-frequency as well as low-frequency words. In addition to the means and standard deviations of the AoA estimates, we report word frequency, concreteness, and imageability ratings, as well as word length measures (numbers of syllables and letters), for the 600 words as supplemental materials. The present ratings represent a potentially useful database for researchers working on lexical processing as well as other aspects of cognitive processing, such as autobiographical memory.

Effects of Valence on Hemispheric Specialization for Emotion Word Processing

The use of emotion in language is a key element of human interactions and a rich area for cognitive research. The present study examined reactions to words of five types: positive emotion (e.g., happiness), negative emotion (e.g., hatred), positive emotion-laden (e.g., blessing), negative emotion-laden (e.g., prison), and neutral (e.g., chance). Words and nonwords were intermixed in a lexical decision task using hemifield presentation. Results revealed a general left hemisphere advantage. Overall, reaction times for positive words were faster than for negative or neutral words and this effect varied by hemifield of presentation. These results support a valence hypothesis of specialized processing in the left hemisphere of the brain for positive emotions and the right hemisphere for negative emotions.

An fMRI investigation of the relationship between future imagination and cognitive flexibility

While future imagination is largely considered to be a cognitive process grounded in default mode network activity, studies have shown that future imagination recruits regions in both default mode and frontoparietal control networks. In addition, it has recently been shown that the ability to imagine the future is associated with cognitive flexibility, and that tasks requiring cognitive flexibility result in increased coupling of the default mode network with frontoparietal control and salience networks. In the current study, we investigated the neural correlates underlying the association between cognitive flexibility and future imagination in two ways. First, we experimentally varied the degree of cognitive flexibility required during future imagination by manipulating the disparateness of episodic details contributing to imagined events. To this end, participants generated episodic details (persons, locations, objects) within three social spheres; during fMRI scanning they were presented with sets of three episodic details all taken from the same social sphere (Congruent condition) or different social spheres (Incongruent condition) and required to imagine a future event involving the three details. We predicted that, relative to the Congruent condition, future simulation in the Incongruent condition would be associated with increased activity in regions of the default mode, frontoparietal and salience networks. Second, we hypothesized that individual differences in cognitive flexibility, as measured by performance on the Alternate Uses Task, would correspond to individual differences in the brain regions recruited during future imagination. A task partial least squares (PLS) analysis showed that the Incongruent condition resulted in an increase in activity in regions in salience networks (e.g. the insula) but, contrary to our prediction, reduced activity in many regions of the default mode network (including the hippocampus). A subsequent functional connectivity (within-subject seed PLS) analysis showed that the insula exhibited increased coupling with default mode regions during the Incongruent condition. Finally, a behavioral PLS analysis showed that individual differences in cognitive flexibility were associated with differences in activity in a number of regions from frontoparietal, salience and default-mode networks during both future imagination conditions, further highlighting that the cognitive flexibility underlying future imagination is grounded in the complex interaction of regions in these networks.

Episodic specificity induction impacts activity in a core brain network during construction of imagined future experiences

Recent behavioral work suggests that an episodic specificity induction-brief training in recollecting the details of a past experience-enhances performance on subsequent tasks that rely on episodic retrieval, including imagining future experiences, solving open-ended problems, and thinking creatively. Despite these far-reaching behavioral effects, nothing is known about the neural processes impacted by an episodic specificity induction. Related neuroimaging work has linked episodic retrieval with a core network of brain regions that supports imagining future experiences. We tested the hypothesis that key structures in this network are influenced by the specificity induction. Participants received the specificity induction or one of two control inductions and then generated future events and semantic object comparisons during fMRI scanning. After receiving the specificity induction compared with the control, participants exhibited significantly more activity in several core network regions during the construction of imagined events over object comparisons, including the left anterior hippocampus, right inferior parietal lobule, right posterior cingulate cortex, and right ventral precuneus. Induction-related differences in the episodic detail of imagined events significantly modulated induction-related differences in the construction of imagined events in the left anterior hippocampus and right inferior parietal lobule. Resting-state functional connectivity analyses with hippocampal and inferior parietal lobule seed regions and the rest of the brain also revealed significantly stronger core network coupling following the specificity induction compared with the control. These findings provide evidence that an episodic specificity induction selectively targets episodic processes that are commonly linked to key core network regions, including the hippocampus.

Reversing the Standard Neural Signature of the Word-Nonword Distinction

The distinction between letter strings that form words and those that look and sound plausible but are not meaningful is a basic one. Decades of functional neuroimaging experiments have used this distinction to isolate the neural basis of lexical (word level) semantics, associated with areas such as the middle temporal, angular, and posterior cingulate gyri that overlap the default mode network. In two fMRI experiments, a different set of findings emerged when word stimuli were used that were less familiar (measured by word frequency) than those typically used. Instead of activating default mode network areas often associated with semantic processing, words activated task-positive areas such as the inferior pFC and SMA, along with multifunctional ventral occipitotemporal cortices related to reading, whereas nonwords activated default mode areas previously associated with semantics. Effective connectivity analyses of fMRI data on less familiar words showed activation driven by task-positive and multifunctional reading-related areas, whereas highly familiar words showed bottom-up activation flow from occipitotemporal cortex. These findings suggest that functional neuroimaging correlates of semantic processing are less stable than previously assumed, with factors such as word frequency influencing the balance between task-positive, reading-related, and default mode networks. More generally, this suggests that results of contrasts typically interpreted in terms of semantic content may be more influenced by factors related to task difficulty than is widely appreciated.