Data from the Human Penguin Project, a cross-national dataset testing social thermoregulation principles.

In the Human Penguin Project (N = 1755), 15 research groups from 12 countries collected body temperature, demographic variables, social network indices, seven widely-used psychological scales and two newly developed questionnaires (the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) and the Kama Muta Frequency Scale (KAMF)). They were collected to investigate the relationship between environmental factors (e.g., geographical, climate etc.) and human behaviors, which is a long-standing inquiry in the scientific community. More specifically, the present project was designed to test principles surrounding the idea of social thermoregulation, which posits that social networks help people to regulate their core body temperature. The results showed that all scales in the current project have sufficient to good psychometrical properties. Unlike previous crowdsourced projects, this dataset includes not only the cleaned raw data but also all the validation of questionnaires in 9 different languages, thus providing a valuable resource for psychological scientists who are interested in cross-national, environment-human interaction studies.

The positive side of a negative reference: the delay between linguistic processing and common ground.

Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a novel looking object as the jellyfish and, once identified, the listener will too. The hypothesized mechanism behind such referential precedents is a subject of debate. The common ground view claims that listeners register the object as well as the identity of the speaker who coined the label. The linguistic view claims that, once established, precedents are treated by listeners like any other linguistic unit, i.e. without needing to keep track of the speaker. To test predictions from each account, we used visual-world eyetracking, which allows observations in real time, during a standard referential communication task. Participants had to select objects based on instructions from two speakers. In the critical condition, listeners sought an object with a negative reference such as not the jellyfish. We aimed to determine the extent to which listeners rely on the linguistic input, common ground or both. We found that initial interpretations were based on linguistic processing only and that common ground considerations do emerge but only after 1000 ms. Our findings support the idea that-at least temporally-linguistic processing can be isolated from common ground.

Pre-stimulus EEG oscillations correlate with perceptual alternation of speech forms.

Speech perception is often seen as a passive process guided by physical stimulus properties. However, ongoing brain dynamics could influence the subsequent perceptual organization of the speech, to an as yet unknown extent. To elucidate this issue, we analyzed EEG oscillatory activity before and immediately after the repetitive auditory presentation of words inducing the so-called verbal transformation effect (VTE), or spontaneous alternation of meanings due to its rapid repetition. Subjects indicated whether the meaning of the bistable word changed or not. For the Reversal more than for the Stable condition, results show a pre-stimulus local alpha desynchronization (300-50ms), followed by an early post-stimulus increase of local beta synchrony (0-80ms), and then a late increase and decrease of local alpha (200-340ms) and beta (360-440ms) synchrony respectively. Additionally, the ERPs showed that reversal positivity (RP) and reversal negativity components (RN), along with a late positivity complex (LPC) correlate with switching between verbal forms. Our results show how the ongoing dynamics brain is actively involved in the perceptual organization of the speech, destabilizing verbal perceptual states, and facilitating the perceptual regrouping of the elements composing the linguistic auditory stimulus.