Studies on eye movements during reading have primarily focussed on the processing of content words (CWs), such as verbs and nouns. Those few studies that have analysed eye movements on function words (FWs), such as articles and prepositions, have reported that FWs are typically skipped more often and, when fixated, receive fewer and shorter fixations than CWs. However, those studies were often conducted in languages where FWs contain comparatively little information (e.g. the in English). In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), FWs can carry gender and number marking. In the present study, we analysed data from the RASTROS corpus of natural reading in BP (Vieira, 2020) and examined the effects of word length, predictability, frequency and word class on eye movements. Very limited differences between FWs and CWs were observed mostly restricted to the skipping rates of short words, such that FWs were skipped more often than CWs. For fixation times, differences were either non-existent or restricted to atypical FWs, such as low frequency FWs, warranting further research. As such, our results are more compatible with studies showing limited or no differences in processing speed between FWs and CWs when influences of word length, frequency and predictability are taken into account.

In everyday life, when we have to formulate judgments, we often end up being influenced by information that is not directly related to the matter at hand. This happens both when we encounter the person in the real-life world, but also in the cyber-world, when for example, we use social networks. In both cases, indeed, based simply on a few images or short stories, we may start to believe fake news or judge someone by generalizing limited information to the overall judgment of that person/situation, as it happens in the halo effect. Even moral assessment can be influenced by limited, non-moral information: However, little is known on how this influence can affect our moral inferences about someone's virtues. We conduct three experiments, in which we assess how aspects non directly connected to moral information, such as looks or fortuitous events, can affect our judgment about someone's morality. The experiments focus on the use of very limited information (e.g., attractiveness and/or short anecdotes), to reproduce the typical information available on a social network (e.g., people post selfies, or brief personal stories about their thoughts and feelings, or brief descriptions of personal events). In all experiments the participants were asked to judge the moral virtues (honesty, courage, wisdom, and hope) of the person in the picture/narrative. Results show that pictures and narratives significantly affect the judgment of virtues. Moreover, the third experiment reveals a combined effect, by enhancing the influence of non-moral aspects on evaluation of someone's moral dispositions.

The ability to spontaneously access knowledge of relational concepts acquired in one domain and apply it to a novel domain has traditionally been explored in the analogy literature via the problem-solving paradigm (cf. Gick & Holyoak, 1980, 1983). In the present work, we propose a novel procedure based on categorization as a complementary approach to assess spontaneous analogical transfer-using one category learning task to enhance learning of the same underlying category structures in another domain. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate larger improvements in classification performance across blocks of training in a Target Category Learning task among participants that underwent a Base Category Learning task relative to a separate group of participants learning the Target category structures for the first time; thus providing evidence for spontaneous transfer of the category structures. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate similar evidence of spontaneous transfer for participants that underwent a comparison-based Base Category Learning task under a more rigorous context-shift between the Base and Target Category Learning tasks. Additional exploratory analyses across both experiments showcase ways in which this paradigm can be used to answer questions regarding the analogical transfer of relational category structures and generate promising paths for future work.

Although cochlear implants (CI) successfully replace the sense of hearing, they do not restore natural hearing. Still, CI users adapt to this novel signal, reaching meaningful levels of speech recognition in clinical tests that focus on repetition of words and short sentences. However, many patients who score above average in clinical speech perception tests complain that everyday speech interactions are both difficult and cognitively draining. In part this difficulty may be due to the naturally rapid pace of everyday discourse. We report a study in which 12 CI users aged 23 to 77, recalled multi-sentence discourse presented without interruption, or in the condition of interest, when passages were paused at major linguistic boundaries, with participants given control of when to initiate the next segment. Comprehension of the discourse structure was based on a formalized representational system that organizes discourse elements hierarchically to index the relative importance of different elements to the overall understanding of the discourse. Results showed (a) better recall when CI users were allowed to control the discourse pace, (b) an overall effect of aging, with older CI users recalling discourse less accurately, (c) better recall for passages with higher average inter-word predictability, (d) a "semantic hierarchy effect" reflected by better recall of main ideas versus minor details, (e) an attenuation of the semantic hierarchy effect for low predictability passages. Results underscore the benefits of extra processing time in addressing CI listening challenges and highlight the limited ecological validity of single-word or single-sentence speech recognition tests.

The present study addressed the role of motor representations in declarative memory (i.e., semantic and episodic). Based on embodied and grounded theories of cognition, it is often suggested that motor representations contribute to declarative memory. According to the action priming effect, graspable objects are categorized faster when primed by pictures of a congruent hand grip, as motor representations (how to grasp it) and semantic information (what it is) are closely related. Moreover, motor representations may contribute to episodic memory functioning. We immobilized participants' dominant hand for 24 hours to impair their processing of hand-related motor representations. This method is known to elicit rapid updating of cortical hand representations, and a slowdown in cognitive tasks linked to hand-related motor cognition. We expected to observe a decreased action priming effect following short-term hand nonuse. We further predicted that in a subsequent recognition task, objects that had been encoded following congruent action priming would be recognized faster by controls, but not by previously immobilized participants. Results did not show any effect of hand nonuse on action priming, suggesting that motor representations are not a decisive factor for this effect. Nonetheless, prime congruence influenced subsequent recognition. Immobilized participants were slower to recognize objects previously seen with an unrelated hand grip prime compared to a congruent one. This result suggests a contribution of motor representation to declarative memory, in particular when the sensorimotor system has previously been impaired.

No abstract.

Multi-stage accounts of Stroop effects suggest that Stroop effects result from different conflict and facilitation components. Consistent with these accounts, Augustinova et al. (2019) reported evidence for task, semantic and response components in Stroop effects. They also investigated how vocal and manual responses impacted the magnitude of each of the conflict and facilitation components. However, the role of phonological components in Stroop effects was not investigated in their study. The impact of phonology on Stroop effects has been observed in several studies (Besner & Stolz, 1998; Parris et al., 2019; Spinks et al., 2000). However, these studies did not investigate the role of different conflict/facilitation components in Stroop effects. To investigate the impact of phonological components as well as task, semantic, and response components on Stroop effects, a vocal and manual Stroop task was for the first time conducted with Chinese speakers using a design similar to that of Augustinova et al. (2019). The data revealed only in the vocal Stroop task phonological conflict and facilitation, whereas semantic and response conflicts were found with vocal and manual responses. Implications of the findings for response modality effects and the measures of facilitation/conflict components are discussed.

Information that is particularly relevant for upcoming behavior can be prioritized within working memory, by directing attention to it. Receiving focused attention during retention is assumed to be associated with specific benefits, such as increased memory performance and reduced vulnerability to perceptual distractions. This has been demonstrated in visuospatial working memory. Given the domain-general nature of the focus of attention, these benefits should extend to verbal working memory as well. This was tested in the current study. In particular, we examined and compared the effects of cue-based and reward-based prioritization in verbal working memory across a series of five preregistered experiments. These experiments varied in their memory materials, set size, interference, and memory task. Our results collectively revealed several key findings. Firstly, both cue-based and reward-based prioritization led to a clear and consistent memory boost for prioritized information in verbal working memory. Secondly, the memory boost induced by cue-based prioritization was mostly comparable to that induced by reward-based prioritization. Thirdly, memory for verbal information did not drastically suffer when exposed to perceptual interference. And lastly, the effect of perceptual interference on verbal information was not drastically influenced by whether the information was prioritized or not. Overall, this series of experiments contributes to understanding the consequences of directed attention in verbal working memory and highlights similarities and differences from findings in visuospatial working memory.

We hypothesized that people of different language backgrounds (English vs. Mandarin Chinese) might think about evolutionary relationships among living things differently. In particular, some reasoning heuristics may come from how living things are named. Our research examined if sub-word and sub-lexical elements in written Chinese influence people's inferences. Some taxon names in Chinese are conjunctive concepts that include another taxon: e.g., panda is called bear cat in Chinese, and the skunk character has a semantic radical (semantic component of a character) that means mouse. These conjunctions might influence Chinese readers to infer that conjunctive concepts share biological characteristics with their constituents (e.g., that skunks share biological properties with mice). Readers in a language (English) without lexical activation from constituents of conjunctive concepts would not be expected to show such effects. This research provided insights into how differences in prior knowledge due to different language backgrounds affect thinking and reasoning.

This study investigates whether estimates of familiarity, valence, arousal and concreteness based on artificial intelligence (AI) are useful alternatives to word counts and human ratings in Spanish. We replicate and extend previous findings in English and show that GPT-4o is effective in estimating these word features. Validity checks even suggest that AI-generated estimates sometimes outperform traditional measurements. The ability to generate AI estimates for large numbers of words at low cost simplifies the process of obtaining word features and provides a new resource for researchers working in Spanish. We provide Excel lists of the collected word features, which can be freely used for research and teaching.

While it has been proposed that new words are encoded in a qualitatively different way from established words - in episodic rather than semantic memory - such accounts are challenged by the finding that newly-learnt words influence the processing of well-known word in semantic priming tasks. In this paper we explore whether this apparent contradiction is due to differences in task design. Specifically, we hypothesised that a large stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) would allow the participant to engage strategic retrieval and priming mechanisms to facilitate the recognition of a semantically related word, compared to a shorter SOA which promotes more automatic processing. In Experiment 1, 60 participants learned 34 novel words and their meanings which later served as primes for related/unrelated existing word targets in a primed lexical decision task, with a 450 ms SOA. There was no significant priming effect. In Experiment 2, we increased the SOA to 1000 ms, and found a significant priming effect with novel words. Finally, there was no significant priming effect with novel words in Experiment 3 that used a 200 ms SOA. A semantic priming effect with familiar words was found in Experiment 1 and Experiment 3, but not Experiment 2 (the longest SOA). We interpret these results as providing evidence for the idea that new and existing words are represented differently, with the former encoded outside of conventional language networks as they appear to rely predominantly on slow (strategic) mechanisms to prime related, existing words.

Previous research has shown that eye movements can serve as an indirect indicator of relational memory. The goal of the current research was to assess how eye movements coincide with different forms of spatial and associative memory. Young adults encoded object-scene combinations and were subsequently presented with repeated, novel, and manipulated scenes. The manipulated object-scene combinations included object additions and deletions (Experiment 1), a change in the location of the object within scenes (Experiment 2), or a change in object-scene combinations (Experiment 3). In Experiment 1, participants allocated more fixations to the critical region of a scene when a novel object was added to a scene versus previously presented within the scene; this effect could be supported by either item or relational memory. By contrast, participants did not preferentially view the region of the scene that an object previously occupied when objects were removed from the scene. For Experiments 2 and 3, participants allocated proportionally more fixations toward the critical region of manipulated than repeated scenes when the location of the object or object-scene combination was changed. These findings provide further support for eye movements reflecting relational memory and highlight the importance of data disaggregation for future studies of relational memory.

The sense of agency, which refers to awareness of causing events, is consistently influenced by the time interval between actions and their outcomes such that longer delays diminish the perceived strength of agency. This study investigated whether the sense of agency is modulated by the absolute distance between experienced delays or by their subjective discriminability, which is known to be subject to Weber's Law (discriminability being a function of ratios rather than absolute differences between time intervals). To this end, participants executed keypress actions leading to outcomes at varying delays. In one experiment, delays were equidistant on a logarithmic scale (constant ratio relationship), while in the other condition, they were equidistant on a linear scale (constant distance relationship). Our results showed that judgments of the agency were predicted better by actual temporal proximity between actions and outcomes compared to their subjective discriminability. Beyond providing a more complete picture regarding the effect of outcome delays on the sense of agency, these findings have broader implications for the mechanistic underpinnings of the sense of agency. They imply that even explicit judgments of agency can be influenced by certain factors transcending conscious experience.

People often cannot remember the source of their memories despite recalling other elements of a remembered event correctly. Observation inflation is one such error of source monitoring. It refers to remembering actions of another agent as self-performed. While the existence of this memory error is well documented, it is not clear how it relates to other errors of source attribution: It is not evident whether the phenomenon reflects (1) a specific tendency to appropriate the actions of other agents, (2) a general confusion of sources with overlapping features or (3) whether it is a confound induced by the complex structure of the conventionally used experimental paradigm. We conducted two online experiments to assess these potential contributions to observation inflation. Crucially, administering a full source monitoring test revealed a symmetrical pattern: Recognizing other's actions as one's own occurred at the same rate as misattributing one's own actions to another agent. The findings resonate with source-monitoring frameworks by suggesting that source attribution errors arise due to the similarity of the sources, whereas the evidence speaks against a special status for appropriating observed actions.

The ability to focus on task-relevant information while ignoring distractors is essential in many everyday life situations. The question of how profound and moderate visual deprivation impacts the engagement with a demanding memory task (top-down control) while ignoring task-irrelevant perceptual information (bottom-up) is not thoroughly understood. In this experiment, 17 blind individuals, 17 visually impaired individuals and 17 sighted controls were asked to recall the sequence of eight auditorily presented digits. Following digit presentation, two auditory distractor streams including a repetitive presentation of the same syllables (steady state sounds) or different syllables (changing state sounds) occurred spoken in different emotional prosodies (happy, fearful, angry, and neutral). Blind individuals not only showed overall superior serial recall performance, but also displayed sustained memory retention for items presented more recently in the sequence (specifically at the fifth to the eighth digit positions) compared to sighted and visually impaired individuals. Furthermore, blind individuals showed a weaker serial position effect compared to visually impaired and sighted individuals. Emotional prosody also impacted serial recall differently in blind, visually impaired and sighted controls: Sighted and visually impaired participants exhibited improved serial recall when steady state sounds carried a fearful or angry prosody. By contrast, in the steady state condition, emotional prosody had no effect on serial recall performance in blind individuals.These findings may be linked to the enhanced ability of blind individuals to flexibly apply a combination of strategies, such as Association and Grouping.

Studies of cue-outcome contingency learning demonstrate outcome-density effects: participants typically overestimate contingencies when the outcome event is relatively frequent. Equivalent cue-density effects occur, though these have been examined less often. Few studies have simultaneously examined both those event density effects or have manipulated the presentation order of the events,limiting knowledge of whether these phenomena share underlying principles-. We report three well-powered experiments to address those gaps. Participants judged the effectiveness of a medical treatment after viewing a series of pairings for two events, a cause (treatment given vs. not) and an effect (patient recovered vs. not). Experiment 1 manipulated both event densities independently. We then manipulated the presentation order for the cause and the effect, alongside a manipulation of effect density (Experiment 2a) or cause density (Experiment 2b). Experiment 1 found a large main effect of event-density (η_p^2 =.55), which was qualified by a significant interaction between event type and density level (η_p^2 =.10) whereby effect density had greater impact than cause density. Experiments 2a and 2b found effects for effect-density (η_p^2=.60) and cause-density (η_p^2=.31). The effects of cause-effect presentation order were always small and non-significant. We conclude that effect-density manipulations had substantial impact on contingency judgments, and cause-density manipulations less so. Moreover, it matters little which event (cause or effect) is seen first. These findings have implications for contingency, associative, probabilistic, and causal models of contingency judgment; primarily, that people may be more sensitive to the causal status of events than to their temporal order of presentation.

As trained educational and developmental psychologists who study the role of working memory in educational outcomes, we know the various assumptions made about definitions and measurements of this cognitive ability. Considering the popularity of the Baddeley and Hitch working memory model (1974) in these fields, we raise challenges related to measurement, overlap with executive function, and adopting working memory measurement approaches from adult models. We propose that researchers consider how working memory tasks might tap multiple other abilities. This is problematic in the context of child cognitive development and in understanding which factors explain educational outcomes in children. We recommend giving greater attention to the central executive, acknowledging the overlap between the central executive and executive function in study design, and investigating a developmental model in the context of the broader abilities evoked in measurement. These recommendations may provide a fuller understanding of working memory's mechanistic role in children's learning and development and assist in developing reasonable adjustments for specific aspects of working memory for children who struggle.

People can easily extract and encode statistical information from their environment. However, research has primarily focused on (i.e., the ability to learn joint and conditional relationships between stimuli) and has largely neglected (i.e., the ability to learn the frequency and variability of distributions). For example, learning that "E" is more common in the English alphabet than "Z." In this article, we investigate how distributional learning can be measured by exploring the relationship between, and psychometric properties of, four different measures of distributional learning-from the ability to discriminate frequencies to the ability to estimate frequencies. We identified moderate relationships between four distributional learning measures and these tasks accounted for a substantial portion of the variance in performance across tasks (44.3%). A measure of divergent validity (intrinsic motivation) did not significantly correlate with any statistical learning measure and accounted for a separate portion of the variance across tasks. Our results suggest that distributional statistical learning encompasses the ability to discriminate between relative frequencies and estimating them.

Humans often behave as if unrelated events are causally related. As the name suggests, such imply failures to detect the absence of a causal relation. Taking a signal detection approach, we asked whether causal illusions indeed reflect failures of discriminability, or whether they reflect a general bias to behave as if events are causally related. Participants responded in a discrete trial procedure in which point gains, point losses, or no change in points occurred dependently on or independently of responding. Participants reported whether each event was response-dependent or response-independent by choosing between two stimuli, one corresponding to reporting "I did it" and the other to "I didn't do it." Overall, participants responded accurately in about 80% of trials and were biased to report that events depended on responding. This bias was strongest after point gains and for higher-performing participants. Such differences in event-specific biases were not related to response rates; instead, they appear to reflect more fundamental differences in the effects of appetitive and aversive events. These findings demonstrate that people can judge causality relatively well, but are biased to attribute events to their own behaviour, particularly when those events are desirable. This highlights discriminability and bias as separable aspects of causal learning, and suggests that some causal illusions may not really be "illusions" at all-they may simply reflect a bias to report causal relations.

We investigated the role of humanisation in Visual Perspective-Taking (VPT) by testing whether and how agent's human-likeness and attractiveness ("hedonic quality") interact with social cues (action and eye gaze) in influencing the participants' disposition to embody another's perspective. In a VPT task, participants viewed scenes displaying an actor (human or robotic) grasping, gazing (or both) a target object, or adopting a still posture, and were required to judge the left/right location of the target, without receiving any instruction on the perspective to be assumed. Across two studies, we selected human and robotic agents to use as actors in the VPT task. Results consistently demonstrated that participants could be effectively clustered by a data-driven method into two perspective-taking styles, depending on the presence of a systematic tendency to locate the target object in the VPT scenarios from own (egocentric) or the actor's (altercentric) point of view. The human versus nonhuman nature of the agent seemed able to affect the participants' egocentric or altercentric tendency whereas both the agent's hedonic quality and social cues were not able to influence this propensity. Identifying the factors influencing altercentrism during human-robot interactions can be essential for developing artificial agents favouring user's acceptance and willingness to interact. In this respect, considering differences among individuals in their propensity to take another's point of view may be of central importance. Clustering approaches can represent a useful means to capture interindividual differences in this central aspect of human social cognition.

Dual tasks are a common phenomenon in everyday life. In dual-task contexts, we perform two-component tasks in temporal overlap, which usually results in impaired performance in one or both of these component tasks relative to single-task contexts. Numerous studies have examined dual-task interference at the level of response selection, but only a few studies have addressed the cognitive representation of a dual task and the cognitive mechanisms controlling these representations. The present review outlines recent empirical findings and theoretical developments concerning these two issues. In detail, the review focuses on different components of a cognitive dual-task representation, including the representation of component-task-specific information (i.e., information about the goal and stimulus-response mapping of a component task), the representation of component-task order information (i.e., information about the order in which the component tasks have to executed), and the representation of dual-task identity information (i.e., information about which two-component tasks have to be performed). A particular emphasis is placed on the cognitive representation of dual-task identity information, which is examined in a recent research line employing the task-pair switching logic as an empirical approach. By conceptualising a dual-task representation as a hierarchical multi-component representation, the review integrates the research line on the cognitive representation of dual-task identity information with the research lines on the representation of component-task-specific information and component-task order information. Based on this conceptualisation, the review provides a new theoretical contribution to dual-task research and highlights an integrative perspective on the different components of cognitive dual-task representations.

This study investigates the impact of phonetic realisation and prosodic prominence on visual letter identification, focusing on the letter  in German bisyllabic words. Building upon previous research, a computerised letter search task was conducted with 78 skilled adult readers. Words featuring different phonetic realisations of  (/eː, ɛ, e, l̩, n̩, ɐ/) in stressed and unstressed first and second syllables were systematically included. Analyses of error rates and response times revealed a graded pattern in the detection of , with the closed long (/eː/) and closed short (/e/) realisations being easiest to detect, open (/ɛ/) and near-open central (/ɐ/) vowels becoming incrementally harder, and silent vowels in syllabic consonants (/n̩/) being the most challenging. Results divided by position and stress of the syllable containing the target letter further indicated influences of prosodic prominence. The findings contribute to understanding the intricate interplay of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and prosodic structure in skilled readers' visual letter recognition.

Previous researches have revealed that initiators preferentially re-orient their attention towards responders with whom they have established joint attention (JA). However, it remains unclear whether this precedence of social re-orienting is inherent to initiators or applies equally to responders, and whether this social re-orienting is modulated by the social contexts in which JA is achieved. To address these issues, the present study adopted a modified virtual-reality paradigm to manipulate social roles (initiator vs. responder), social behaviours (JA vs. Non-JA), and social contexts (intentional vs. incidental). Results indicated that people, whether as initiators or responders, exhibited a similar prioritisation pattern of social re-orienting, and this was independent of the social contexts in which JA was achieved, revealing that the prioritisation of social re-orienting is an inherent social attentional mechanism in humans. It should be noted, however, that the distinct social cognitive systems engaged when individuals switched roles between initiator and responder were only driven during intentional (Experiment 1) rather than incidental (Experiment 2) JA. These findings provide potential insights for understanding the shared attention system and the integrated framework of attentional and mentalising processes.

We investigated how presenting online health information in different modalities can influence memory, as this may be particularly important for older adults who may need to make regular decisions about health and could also face additional challenges such as memory deficits and sensory impairment (hearing loss). We tested whether, as predicted by some literature, older adults would disproportionately benefit from audio-visual (AV) information compared with visual-only (VO) or auditory-only (AO) information, relative to young adults. Participants were 78 young adults (aged 18-30 years old,  = 25.50 years), 78 older adults with normal hearing (aged 65-80 years old,  = 68.34 years), and 78 older adults who wear hearing aids (aged 65-79 years old,  = 70.89 years). There were no significant differences in the amount of information remembered across modalities (AV, VO, AO), no differences across participant groups, and we did not find the predicted interaction between participant group and modality. The older-adult groups performed worse than young adults on background measures of cognition, with the exception of a vocabulary test, suggesting that they may have been using strategies based on prior knowledge and experience to compensate for cognitive and/or sensory deficits. The findings indicate that cost-effective, text-based websites may be just as useful as those with edited videos for conveying health information to all age groups and hearing aid users.

Enhanced rationality has been linked to higher levels of autistic traits, characterised by increased deliberation and decreased intuition, alongside reduced susceptibility to common reasoning biases. However, it is unclear whether this is domain-specific or domain-general. We aimed to explore whether reasoning tendencies differ across social and non-social domains in relation to autistic traits. We conducted two experiments ( = 72,  = 217) using a reasoning task with social and non-social scenario comparisons to evaluate the specific information participants used when making judgments about children, in the social domain, and objects, in the non-social domain. We consistently found a greater reliance on behaviour-based information in the non-social domain, compared to the social domain, indicating a more deliberative approach. In Experiment 1, we found a correlation between autistic traits and the proportion of behaviour-based information, suggesting a more deliberative approach, when making judgments about children, and not about objects. In Experiment 2, with a larger sample, shortened version of the reasoning task, and requests for written justification, we did not identify a significant correlation between these variables. With this study, we introduce a novel scenario-based reasoning task that systematically compares the social and non-social domains. Our findings highlight the complex nature of the relationship between reasoning style and autistic traits.

Individuals typically exhibit attentional bias towards stimuli that are considered valuable. This study aimed to investigate the effect of chronic academic stress on attentional bias towards value-associated stimuli. Both the stress group (preparation for a critical academic examination) and the control group performed a modified dot-probe task. Two-colour stimuli were presented simultaneously, one of which was associated with high or low monetary rewards through the value-associated training. The participants were then instructed to respond to the location of a probe dot which was presented either congruent or incongruent towards the value-associated stimuli. In the neutral condition, both stimuli were not value-associated ones. The results showed that (1) in the value-associated training task, shorter reaction times (RTs) and higher accuracies were observed for the high-value trials compared with the low-value trials in both groups, suggesting a successful association between neutral stimuli and value; (2) in the dot-probe task, the RTs were shorter for the high-/low-value congruent conditions compared with the high-/low-value incongruent conditions in both groups, suggesting an attentional bias towards value-associated stimuli; (3) compared to the control group, the stress group showed an increased disengagement (RT - RT) effect but a similar orienting (RT - RT) effect. These results suggested that chronic academic stress may promote attentional bias towards value-associated stimuli by impairing attentional disengagement.

Disgust is a powerful emotion that evolved to protect us from contamination and diseases; it also cores to very human feelings, such as shame. In anorexia nervosa, most of the knowledge on disgust regards food. However, disgust can be elicited by varied drivers, including body-related self-disgust, which may be more central to this condition. Here, we investigate in depth how disgust triggers related to the body influence altered representations in anorexia nervosa. Women with anorexia nervosa and healthy women performed the Hand Laterality Task, in which they were asked to judge the laterality of hands without and with a disgust charging feature (i.e., with a body product or with a body violation). We computed accuracy and reaction time for the effect of biomechanical constraints, an index of motor imagery. We also measured the general disgust sensitivity through a self-report questionnaire. Participants with anorexia nervosa were overall less accurate and slower compared with controls, suggesting a non-canonical (i.e., not based on motor imagery) approach to solving the task. However, they showed the same pattern of responses as controls for disgust-charged stimuli, despite reporting higher levels of disgust sensitivity. Our results suggested the absence of specific effects of disgust drivers on the (altered) body in action representation in anorexia nervosa. We discuss this evidence focusing on the role of the psychopathological symptoms characterising anorexia nervosa. We also reflect on the efficacy of experimental methodologies used to detect alterations in body representation in this clinical condition.

Affective words can be classified into two types: emotion words (EM words, e.g., "happy") and emotion-laden words (EL words, e.g., "wedding"). Several studies have shown differences in processing between EM and EL words, although results are inconclusive. These two types of words may have representational differences because affective content is an inherent part of the semantic features of EM words (i.e., denotative meaning) but not of EL words, whose affective content is part of their connotative meaning (i.e., these words do not name emotions, but are associated to emotions). In this study, we tested a set of Chinese EM and EL words. Both conditions included positive and negative words. The study involved two tasks, an implicit task, in which emotional content was not relevant (lexical decision task, LDT), and an explicit task, in which the emotional content was relevant (affective categorization task, ACT). Our results showed that participants responded faster to EM words than to EL words. This advantage was mostly observed in the ACT and with negative words. These results reveal differences in processing between EM and EL words which can be related to the greater relevance of affective content in the meaning of EM words compared to EL words.

The lexical boost is an increase in structural priming with overlapping elements like verbs. Residual activation priming theories argue that the boost is an automatic side effect of sentence planning. In contrast, explicit memory theories of the boost argue that it is the result of a non-automatic explicit memory retrieval. These theories were contrasted in Japanese by including a prime memory task in a structural priming study. Structural priming was found for both datives and passives, but no lexical boost was found and one possible reason was that explicit memory for the prime structure was weak. In a follow-up study, priming was found in a sentence completion task, but there was no lexical boost. The existence of abstract priming and the lack of a lexical boost in these studies falsifies theories that argue that verb overlap automatically creates a boost under conditions that exhibit abstract priming.