Relational labeling unlocks inert knowledge.

Insightful solutions often come about by recalling a relevant prior situation-one that shares the same essential relational pattern as the current problem. Unfortunately, our memory retrievals often depend primarily on surface matches, rather than relational matches. For example, a person who is familiar with the idea of positive feedback in sound systems may fail to think of it in the context of global warming. We suggest that one reason for the failure of cross-domain relational retrieval is that relational information is typically encoded variably, in a context-dependent way. In contrast, the surface features of that context-such as objects, animals and characters-are encoded in a relatively stable way, and are therefore easier to retrieve across contexts. We propose that the use of relational language can serve to make situations' relational representations more uniform, thereby facilitating relational retrieval. In two studies, we find that providing relational labels for situations at encoding or at retrieval increased the likelihood of relational retrieval. In contrast, domain labels-labels that highlight situations' contextual features-did not reliably improve domain retrieval. We suggest that relational language allows people to retrieve knowledge that would otherwise remain inert and contributes to domain experts' insight.

Impacts of Dynamic LED Lighting on the Well-Being and Experience of Office Occupants.

As a critical factor in the built environment, lighting presents considerable influence on occupants. Previous research across static lighting conditions has found that both illuminance and correlated color temperature (CCT) affect occupants' physiological and psychological functioning. However, little research has been conducted on the non-visual impacts of dynamic lighting with daily variation in illuminance and CCT levels. The purpose of this study is to better understand the impact of dynamic lighting on office occupants' health, well-being and experience at a living lab. Fifteen participants were recruited to work in three office modules for four months. Four lighting conditions were designed and implemented in this study, including two static lighting conditions and two dynamic lighting conditions with a specific predefined control scheme. A prototype lighting system with enhanced control capabilities was configured and implemented to ensure the desired lighting environment protocol. Both objective methods and subjective surveys were used to assess the behavioral and physiological outcomes of interest, including mental stress, sleep, productivity, satisfaction, mood, visual comfort and perceived naturalness. The results showed that the daytime behavioral impacts were either positive or mixed. Specifically, a significant alertness increase was observed in the afternoon, indicating a potential solution to reduce the natural feelings of sleepiness during the workday. There was also a marginal benefit for mood. The nighttime impacts include a significant decrease in perceived sleep quality and sleep time after subjects were exposed to dynamic lighting. No significant differences were observed for mental stress, productivity, visual comfort, or perceived naturalness. The findings present additional insights into the non-visual impacts of dynamic lighting and give recommendations for further investigations.

Can a relational mindset boost analogical retrieval?

BACKGROUND: Memory retrieval is driven by similarity between a present situation and some prior experience, but not all similarity is created equal. Analogical retrieval, rooted in the similarity between two situations in their underlying structural relations, is often responsible for new insights and innovative solutions to problems. However, superficial similarity is instead more likely to drive spontaneous retrieval. How can we make analogical retrieval more likely? Inducing a relational mindset via an analogical reasoning task has previously been shown to boost subsequent relational thinking. In this paper, we examined whether inducing a relational mindset could also boost analogical retrieval. RESULTS: We find that a relational mindset can increase analogical retrieval if induced before information is encoded in the first place, amplifying the effect of a clearly labelled relational structure. On the other hand, inducing a relational mindset at the time of retrieval did not increase analogical retrieval. CONCLUSION: This work further demonstrates the central importance of high-quality relational encoding for subsequent relation-based analogical retrieval, and that inducing a relational mindset can improve those encodings.

Behavioural and Neural Responses to Facial Disfigurement.

Faces are among the most salient and relevant visual and social stimuli that humans encounter. Attractive faces are associated with positive character traits and social skills and automatically evoke larger neural responses than faces of average attractiveness in ventral occipito-temporal cortical areas. Little is known about the behavioral and neural responses to disfigured faces. In two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that people harbor a disfigured is bad bias and that ventral visual neural responses, known to be amplified to attractive faces, represent an attentional effect to facial salience rather than to their rewarding properties. In our behavioral study (N = 79), we confirmed the existence of an implicit 'disfigured is bad' bias. In our functional MRI experiment (N = 31), neural responses to photographs of disfigured faces before treatment evoked greater neural responses within ventral occipito-temporal cortex and diminished responses within anterior cingulate cortex. The occipito-temporal activity supports the hypothesis that these areas are sensitive to attentional, rather than reward properties of faces. The relative deactivation in anterior cingulate cortex, informed by our behavioral study, may reflect suppressed empathy and social cognition and indicate evidence of a possible neural mechanism underlying dehumanization.

Metaphor: Bridging embodiment to abstraction.

Embodied cognition accounts posit that concepts are grounded in our sensory and motor systems. An important challenge for these accounts is explaining how abstract concepts, which do not directly call upon sensory or motor information, can be informed by experience. We propose that metaphor is one important vehicle guiding the development and use of abstract concepts. Metaphors allow us to draw on concrete, familiar domains to acquire and reason about abstract concepts. Additionally, repeated metaphoric use drawing on particular aspects of concrete experience can result in the development of new abstract representations. These abstractions, which are derived from embodied experience but lack much of the sensorimotor information associated with it, can then be flexibly applied to understand new situations.

Well-Hidden Regularities: Abstract Uses of in and on Retain an Aspect of Their Spatial Meaning.

Prepositions name spatial relationships (e.g., book on a table). But they are also used to convey abstract, non-spatial relationships (e.g., Adrian is on a roll)-raising the question of how the abstract uses relate to the concrete spatial uses. Despite considerable success in delineating these relationships, no general account exists for the two most frequently extended prepositions: in and on. We test the proposal that what is preserved in abstract uses of these prepositions is the relative degree of control between the located object (the figure) and the reference object (the ground). Across four experiments, we find a continuum of greater figure control for on (e.g., Jordan is on a roll) and greater ground control for in (e.g., Casey is in a depression). These findings bear on accounts of semantic structure and language change, as well as on second language instruction.