Clouded judgments? The role of virtual weather in word valence evaluations.

Exploring the dynamic interface of environmental psychology and psycholinguistics, this investigation delves into how simulated weather conditions - sunny versus rainy - affect emotional perceptions of linguistic stimuli within a Virtual Reality (VR) framework. Participants assessed words' emotional valence being exposed to these distinct environmental simulations. Contrary to expectations, we found that while rainy conditions modestly prolonged response times, they did not significantly alter the emotional valence attributed to words. Our study shows that weather can affect emotional cognition, but intrinsic emotional word properties are resilient to environmental influences. This highlights the complex interplay between environmental factors and linguistic processing and reaffirms the importance of environmental contexts in cognitive and emotional evaluations, especially in the face of climate change. By integrating VR technology with environmental psychology and linguistics, our research offers novel insights into the subtle yet significant ways in which virtual and real-world environments converge to shape human emotional and cognitive responses.

Does narrator variability facilitate incidental word learning in the classroom?

Recent studies have revealed that presenting novel words across various contexts (i.e., contextual diversity) helps to consolidate the meaning of these words both in adults and children. This effect has been typically explained in terms of semantic distinctiveness (e.g., Semantic Distinctiveness Model, Jones et al., Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(2), 115, 2012). However, the relative influence of other, non-semantic, elements of the context is still unclear. In this study, we examined whether incidental learning of new words in children was facilitated when the words were uttered by several individuals rather than when they were uttered by the same individual. In the learning phase, the to-be-learned words were presented through audible fables recorded either by the same voice (low diversity) or by different voices (high diversity). Subsequently, word learning was assessed through two orthographic and semantic integration tasks. Results showed that words uttered by different voices were learned better than those uttered by the same voice. Thus, the benefits of contextual diversity in word learning extend beyond semantic differences among contexts; they also benefit from perceptual differences among contexts.

Cognitive estimation of speed, movement and time across the lifespan.

We investigated the role of age and gender in cognitive estimation abilities. Participants completed two online tasks, where different categories of estimation were assessed (speed estimation by time and distance, and auditory estimation). Data from a total of 18886 participants (9911 females) with ages between 18 and 65 years old were gathered. Results showed variations in the estimation capacity as a function of age, with a slow but progressive decline. Estimates of duration and sound seemed to be more affected by age than estimates of speed and movement. Overall, male participants showed a better performance on both auditory and visual estimation tasks compared to females.

Misspelled logotypes: the hidden threat to brand identity.

Brand names are valuable company assets often accompanied by a unique graphical composition (i.e., as logotypes). Recent research has demonstrated that this uniqueness makes brand names and logotypes susceptible to counterfeiting through misspelling by transposition in tasks that require participants to identify correct spellings. However, our understanding of how brand names are incidentally processed when presented as logotypes is incomplete. To address this gap in knowledge, we conducted a virtual reality experiment to explore the transposed-letter confusability effect on brand name recognition. Participants were immersed in a virtual reality setting and incidentally exposed to logotypes that had correctly spelled brand names or included letter transpositions. Offline analyses revealed that participants were more accurate at recognizing brand names that had been presented with correct spellings than those that had been misspelled. Furthermore, participants exhibited false memories for misspelled logotypes, recalling them as if they had been spelled correctly. Thus, our findings revealed that the incidental processing of misspelled logotypes (e.g., SASMUNG) affects the accuracy of logotype identity recognition, thereby underscoring the challenges faced by individuals when identifying brand names and the elements that make counterfeits so effective.

Assessing Inhibitory Control in the Real World Is Virtually Possible: A Virtual Reality Demonstration.

Executive functions are the key ingredient for behaviour regulation. Among them, inhibitory control is one of the main exponents of executive functions, and in the last decades, it has received a good amount of attention thanks to the development of chronometric tasks associated with paradigms that allow exploring human behaviour when the inhibitory component is needed. Among the different paradigms typically used, the Simon and flanker tasks are probably the most popular ones. These have been subjected to modifications in order to assess inhibitory control from different perspectives (e.g., in different samples or in combination with different research techniques). However, its use has been relegated to classical presentation modalities within laboratory settings. The accessibility of virtual reality (VR) technology has opened new research avenues to investigate inhibition control with a high ecological validity while retaining tightly controlled lab conditions and good measurement accuracy. We present two cutting-edge modifications of the standard Simon and flanker tasks that have been adapted to real-world settings using VR and human-like avatars as target stimuli. Our findings show that virtual reality is a credible tool for testing inhibitory control with a high degree of transferability and generalizability to the real world.

Environment Context Variability and Incidental Word Learning: A Virtual Reality Study.

Previous research has shown that changes in the scenarios in which something is learned and recalled, respectively, may result in a subpar performance in memory recollection. The current study aimed to evaluate how changes in the visuo-perceptual environmental learning context impact incidental vocabulary learning. To this end, a highly immersive virtual reality setting was created, and participants were required to read eight distinct stories visually presented to them. A novel word was delivered twice in every paragraph and embedded in each story. Stories could be displayed either in a high variability condition, where each paragraph was shown in a new environment context (four different classrooms) or in a low variability condition, where each paragraph was shown in the same context. The findings obtained across four assessment tasks (free recall, recognition, picture matching, and sentence completion) demonstrated that significant visuo-perceptual variability did not bring about any disadvantages in word learning. Thus, perceptual information from a physically diverse environment could provide a variety of instructional and educational beneficial possibilities in the absence of a learning disadvantage.

Does the cowl make the monk? Detecting counterfeits in brand names versus logos.

Companies and products are identified by their brand names, which are typically written with a specific letter style, color, and design (i.e., logos). This graphical information offers a distinctive image that facilitates their recognition. However, the uniqueness of these configuration cues may make brand names more vulnerable to counterfeiting via misspelling. We examined whether the confusability at detecting misspelled brand names is higher when embedded in the full logo than when presented in plain format (Experiment 1), when removing all graphical information of the logo other than typeface (Experiment 2), and when only modifying the typeface (Experiment 3). Participants had to decide whether the presented item was a correctly spelled brand name. The misspelled stimuli were created by either transposing or replacing two internal letters of popular brand names (amazon → amzaon vs. amceon), thus allowing us to have a measure of the transposed-letter confusability effect. Results showed a sizeable transposed-letter confusability effect for all types of brand names, but the effect was greatest for the misspelled full logos. Thus, the distinctiveness of the graphical information in logos has a deleterious side effect: logos are quite vulnerable to counterfeiting via misspelling branding.