Wilhelm Wundt: His bumpy start in science at the University of Tübingen.

In 1851, Wilhelm Wundt embarked on his university journey at the University of Tübingen, initially enrolling as a medical student. This article draws from Wundt's autobiography and supplementary sources to illuminate the motivations behind his choice of Tübingen, shedding light on how this pivotal phase influenced both his scientific trajectory and his personal development. It offers insights into Wundt's perspectives on university and city life in Tübingen, providing a nuanced understanding of his formative years. Wundt's nonlinear entry into the realm of science serves as a source of reassurance and inspiration for contemporary psychology students facing similar initial challenges in their academic pursuits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Experiential traces first: Does holding a location in visuospatial working memory affect the processing of space-associated words?

This study aimed to systematically examine whether actively maintaining a visual location in working memory can influence the processing of spatially related words. In five experiments, we asked participants to maintain either the location or the shape of a visually presented stimulus in working memory so that it could later be compared with a test stimulus concerning the relevant target features. In between, we presented participants with words that refer to objects typically encountered in the upper or lower vertical space (roof vs. root, respectively). The task participants performed as a response to these words differed between experiments. In Experiments 1-3, participants performed a lexical decision task, in Experiment 4 they performed a semantic task (deciding whether the word refers to an occupation), and in Experiment 5 they performed a spatial task (deciding whether the word refers to something in the upper or lower visual field.) Only in Experiment 5 did we observe an interaction between the position of the visual stimulus held in working memory (up vs. down) and the meaning of the spatial words (associated with up vs. down). Our results therefore suggest that actively maintaining a stimulus location in working memory does not automatically affect the processing of spatially related words, but does so if the relevant spatial dimension is made highly salient by the task. The results are thus in line with studies showing a strong context-dependency of embodiment effects and thus allow the conclusion that language processing proper is not operating on a sensorimotor representational format.

Do linguistic stimuli activate experiential colour traces related to the entities they refer to and, if so, under what circumstances?

The simulation view of language comprehension holds that lexical-semantic access prompts the re-enactment of sensorimotor experiences that regularly accompany word use. For the colour domain, this suggests that reading about a stop sign reactivates experiences involving the perception of the stop sign and hence experiences involving the colour red. However, it is still not clear what circumstances would limit reactivation of colour experiences during comprehension, if the activation takes place. To address this question, we varied in our study the conditions in which the target colour stimuli appeared. The experimental stimuli were individual words (Experiment (Exp.) 1, Exp. 7, 8) or sentences (Exp. 2-6) referring to objects with a typical colour of either green or red (e.g., cucumber or raspberry). Across experiments, we manipulated the presence of fillers (present or not), and whether fillers referred to objects with other colour (e.g., honey) or objects without any particular colour (e.g., car). The stimuli were presented along with two clickable "yes" and "no" buttons, one of which was red and the other green. Location and button colour varied from trial to trial. The tasks were lexical decision (Exp. 1, Exp. 7-8) and sensibility judgement (Exp. 2-6). We observed faster response times in the match vs mismatch condition in all word-based experiments, but only in those sentence-based experiments that did not have fillers. This suggests that comprehenders indeed reactivate colour experiences when processing linguistic stimuli referring to objects with a typical colour, but this activation seems to occur only under certain circumstances.

Mental association of time and valence.

Five experiments investigated the association between time and valence. In the first experiment, participants classified temporal expressions (e.g., past, future) and positively or negatively connotated words (e.g., glorious, nasty) based on temporal reference or valence. They responded slower and made more errors in the mismatched condition (positive/past mapped to one hand, negative/future to the other) compared with the matched condition (positive/future to one hand, negative/past to the other hand). Experiment 2 confirmed the generalization of the match effect to nonspatial responses, while Experiment 3 found no reversal of this effect for left-handers. Overall, the results of the three experiments indicate a robust match effect, associating the past with negative valence and the future with positive valence. Experiment 4 involved rating the valence of time-related words, showing higher ratings for future-related words. Additionally, Experiment 5 employed latent semantic analysis and revealed that linguistic experiences are unlikely to be the source of this time-valence association. An interactive activation model offers a quantitative explanation of the match effect, potentially arising from a favorable perception of the future over the past.

Modal and amodal cognition: an overarching principle in various domains of psychology.

Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in specific domains of cognition (e.g., perception, mental imagery, and language). However, in this paper, we suggest that both formats play a major role in most cognitive domains. We believe that a comprehensive theory of cognition requires a solid understanding of these representational formats and their functional roles within and across different domains of cognition, the developmental trajectory of these representational formats, and their role in dysfunctional behavior. Here we sketch such an overarching perspective that brings together research from diverse subdisciplines of psychology on modal and amodal representational formats so as to unravel their functional principles and their interactions.

Practice makes perfect: Restrained eaters' heightened control for food images.

OBJECTIVE: Restrained eaters (RE) show behaviourally unregulated food intake, which is often explained by a deficit in inhibitory control. Despite evidence for general inhibitory deficits in RE, it remains unclear how the variety of (food) cues in our environment can influence cognitive control. METHOD: In this re-analysis, we explored the inhibitory capacity of RE and unrestrained eaters (URE) on a stop-signal task with modal (pictures) and amodal (word) food and non-food stimuli. RESULTS: Although we did not find the expected inhibitory deficits in RE compared to URE, we found a significant Group × Modality × Stimulus Type interaction. This indicated that RE have relatively good inhibitory control for food, compared to non-food modal cues, and that this relationship is reversed for amodal cues. CONCLUSIONS: Hence, we showed differential processing of information based on food-specificity and presentation format in RE. The format of food cues is thus an important new avenue to understand how the food environment impedes those struggling with regulating their eating behaviour.

Does negation influence the choice of sentence continuations? Evidence from a four-choice cloze task.

Event plausibility facilitates the processing of affirmative sentences, but little is known about how it affects negative sentences. In six behavioural experiments, we investigated negation's impact on the choice of sentence continuations that differ with respect to event plausibility. In a four-choice cloze task, participants saw affirmative and negative sentence fragments (The child will [not] eat the . . .) in combination with four potential continuations: yoghurt (a plausible word), shellfish (a weak world knowledge violating word), branch (a severe world knowledge violating word), and minivan (a word resulting in a semantic violation). Across all experiments the plausible word was highly preferred in both affirmative and negative sentences. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 while ruling out the possibility that the lack of effect of negation in Experiment 1 stemmed from participants not fully processing the negation. Experiment 3 showed that the observed plausibility effects can be generalised to other aspectual forms (The child has [not] eaten the yoghurt). Experiment 4 ruled out the possibility that the choices were mainly driven by lexical associations and additionally suggested a role for informativity. Experiment 5 replicated Experiment 4 and reinforced the general pattern according to which negative sentences express the denial of plausible positive events. Experiment 6 provided evidence that informativity might be driving patterns of choices in the negative sentences. All in all, these findings suggest that upcoming continuations are chosen to maximise the plausibility of the event in the affirmative sentences and to deny that event in the negative sentences. The observed plausibility effects do not seem to be modulated by the internal representation of events, but they can be modulated by changes to the expected informativity of the sentence.

Association between abstraction level and time: Are future and past more abstract than the present?

Construal level theory suggests that objects or events are represented differently depending on their psychological distance from ourselves. Specifically, objects and events should be represented more abstractly the farther they are removed from direct experience through distance in the spatial, temporal, social, or hypotheticality domains. Bar-Anan et al. reported a key finding supporting this assumed association of the various distance dimensions and abstraction level. In their study, participants responded faster in an Implicit Association Task when temporally near and concrete concepts, as well as temporally far and abstract concepts, were mapped to the same rather than different response keys. In this study, we conceptually replicated this basic finding when employing temporal adverbs relating to present versus future time, and nouns referring to concrete versus abstract concepts (Experiment 1). Evidence for such an association, however, was largely absent (and significantly weaker than in Experiment 1) when temporal adverbs relating to the past were employed as instances of the large temporal distance category (Experiment 2). We propose that the uncertainty associated with the future, as opposed to the past, might play an important role in this temporal asymmetry by increasing psychological distance.

Collective nouns are conceptually plural: Evidence from the grammatical SNARC effect.

To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., committee, team), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they nonetheless are conceptually plural (i.e., construed as consisting of multiple entities) by using the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) paradigm (Dehaene & Changeux, 1993). In this paradigm, participants are typically faster to respond to smaller numbers or numerical stimuli when making a response on their left and faster to respond to larger numbers or numerical stimuli when making a response on their right. In three experiments, participants saw German words on a computer screen and decided whether each one described a single entity or something that could be subdivided into multiple entities (Experiment 1) or whether they would use "ist" or "sind" ("is" or "are") in combination with the word if it were the subject of a sentence (Experiments 2 and 3). The mapping of responses to participants' left and right hands was counterbalanced. Experiment 1 failed to show a grammatical SNARC effect. Experiments 2 and 3 showed a grammatical SNARC effect that extended to collective noun phrases. The results of these experiments suggest that collective noun phrases are instantiated as conceptually plural in comprehenders' minds. We discuss the differential task effects and the implications of these data on theories of language comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Activation levels of plausible alternatives in conversational negation.

Negation is often used to contradict or correct (e.g. There is no dog here.). While rejecting some state of affairs that is presumed to hold for the recipient (e.g. There is a dog here.), the speaker might implicitly suggest a set of plausible alternatives (e.g. There is a wolf instead.). Prior work indicates that alternatives are highly relevant to the comprehension of sentences involving focus: in priming studies, listeners infer plausible alternatives to focused items even when they are not contextually available. So far it is unclear whether negation similarly activates an automatic search for plausible alternatives. The current study was designed to investigate this question, by looking at the activation levels of nouns after negative and affirmative sentences. In a series of priming experiments, subjects were presented with negative and affirmative sentences (e.g. There is an/no apple.), followed by a lexical decision task with targets including plausible alternatives (e.g. pear), as well as semantically related but implausible alternatives (e.g. seed). An interaction of Sentence Polarity and Prime-Target Relation was expected, with negation facilitating responses to plausible alternatives. Results of the first experiment were numerically in line with the hypothesis but the interaction just missed significance level. A post hoc analysis revealed the expected significant interaction. Possible roles of sentential context and goodness of alternatives are discussed. A further experiment confirms that the goodness of alternatives is in fact critical in modulating the effect.

The experiential basis of compatibility effects in reading-by-rotating paradigms.

The current study originates from inconsistent findings within the framework of embodied language processing, specifically in the reading-by-rotating literature: whereas some studies report a match advantage (e.g., Zwaan and Taylor (J Exp Psychol 135:1, 2006)), i.e., shorter reading times when the direction of a linguistically conveyed manual rotation matched rather than mismatched the direction of an actually to be performed manual rotation Claus (Acta Psychol 156:104-113, 2015) found a mismatch advantage. The current study addresses two explanations that were previously discussed as potentially responsible for this inconsistency: on the one hand, differences in the knob devices employed; on the other hand, differences in the perspectives adopted by the readers depending on the number of characters involved in the narratives. Concurrently, the study exploits individual differences in motoric experience to explore the experiential basis of action-sentence compatibility effects. The results are inconclusive with respect to the two explanations. However, in their overall picture, they contribute suggestive considerations for the ongoing debate on action-simulation effects by pointing to the potential role of interindividual variation in motoric experience.

Replacing vertical actions by mouse movements: a web-suited paradigm for investigating vertical spatial associations.

The number of web-based studies in experimental psychology has been growing tremendously throughout the last few years. However, a straightforward web-based implementation does not exist for all types of experimental paradigms. In the current paper, we focus on how vertical response movements-which play a crucial role in spatial cognition and language research-can be translated into a web-based setup. Specifically, we introduce a web-suited counterpart of the vertical Stroop task (e.g., Fox & Shor, in Bull Psychon Soc 7:187-189, 1976; Lachmair et al., in Psychon Bull Rev 18:1180-1188, 2011; Thornton et al., in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 39:964-973, 2013). We employed nouns referring to entities typically located in lower or upper vertical space (e.g., "worm" and "bird", respectively) in Experiments 1 and 2, and emotional valence words associated with a crouched or an upward bodily posture (e.g., "sadness" and "excitement", respectively) in Experiment 3. Depending on the font color, our participants used their mouse to drag the words to the lower or upper screen location. Across all experiments, we consistently observed congruency effects analogous to those obtained with the lab paradigm using actual vertical arm movements. Consequently, we conclude that our web-suited paradigm establishes a reliable approach to examining vertical spatial associations.

The grounding of logical operations: The role of color, shape, and emotional faces for "yes" or "no" decisions.

Concerning the evolution of our mind, it is of core interest to understand how high-level cognitive functions are embedded within low-level cognitive functions. While the grounding of meaning units such as content words and sentence has been widely investigated, little is known about logical cognitive operations and their association with nonlinguistic cognition. However, recent theoretical claims have suggested that "the foundations of logical oppositions and negation may well be much more deeply rooted in the physiological structure of human cognition than is standardly assumed" (p. 227, Jaspers, 2012). The present study investigated potential candidates for such a grounding process by exploring the associations between basic "yes" versus "no" decisions and nonlinguistic features. In five preregistered experiments investigating the interplay between deciding "yes" or "no" and color, shape, and facial expressions, there was converging evidence for the intercoupling between the process of performing a "yes" (agreeing) or "no" (rejecting) decision and emotional faces (happy/sad), color (green/red), and also shape (round/square and soft/sharp). Potential mechanisms for such associations are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Sentence-based mental simulations: Evidence from behavioral experiments using garden-path sentences.

Language comprehenders activate mental representations of sensorimotor experiences related to the content of utterances they process. However, it is still unclear whether these sensorimotor simulations are driven by associations with words or by a more complex process of meaning composition into larger linguistic expressions, such as sentences. In two experiments, we investigated whether comprehenders indeed create sentence-based simulations. Materials were constructed such that simulation effects could only emerge from sentence meaning and not from word-based associations alone. We additionally asked when during sentence processing these simulations are constructed, using a garden-path paradigm. Participants read either a garden-path sentence (e.g., "As Mary ate the egg was in the fridge") or a corresponding unambiguous control with the same meaning and words (e.g., "The egg was in the fridge as Mary ate"). Participants then judged whether a depicted entity was mentioned in the sentence or not. In both experiments, picture response times were faster when the picture was compatible (vs. incompatible) with the sentence-based interpretation of the target entity (e.g., both for garden-path and control sentence: an unpeeled egg), suggesting that participants created simulations based on the sentence content and only operating over the sentence as a whole.

Experience-driven meaning affects lexical choices during language production.

The role of meaning facets based on sensorimotor experiences is well investigated in comprehension but has received little attention in language production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether experiential traces of space influenced lexical choices when participants completed visually presented sentence fragments (e.g., "You are at the sea and you see a . . .") with spoken nouns (e.g., "dolphin," "palm tree"). The words were presented consecutively in an ascending or descending direction, starting from the centre of the screen. These physical spatial cues did not influence lexical choices. However, the produced nouns met the spatial characteristics of the broader sentence contexts such that the typical spatial locations of the produced noun referents were predicted by the location of the situations described by the sentence fragments (i.e., upper or lower sphere). By including distributional semantic similarity measures derived from computing cosine values between sentence nouns and produced nouns using a web-based text corpus, we show that the meaning dimension of "location in space" guides lexical selection during speaking. We discuss the relation of this spatial meaning dimension to accounts of experientially grounded and usage-based theories of language processing and their combination in hybrid approaches. In doing so, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the many facets of meaning processing during language production and their impact on the words we select to express verbal messages.

The action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE): Meta-analysis of a benchmark finding for embodiment.

The embodied account of language comprehension has been one of the most influential theoretical developments in the recent decades addressing the question how humans comprehend and represent language. To examine its assumptions, many studies have made use of behavioral paradigms involving basic compatibility effects. The action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) is one of the most influential of these compatibility effects and is the most widely cited evidence for the embodied account of language comprehension. However, recently there have been difficulties in extending or even in reliably replicating the ACE. The conflicting findings concerning the ACE and its extensions lead to the discussion of whether the ACE is indeed a reliable effect. In a first step we conducted a meta-analysis using a random-effects model. This analysis revealed a small but significant effect size of the ACE. Furthermore, the task-parameter Delay occurred as a factor of interest in whether the ACE appears with positive or negative effect direction. A second meta-analytic approach (Fisher's method) supports these findings. Additionally, an analysis of publication bias suggests that there is bias in the ACE literature. In post-hoc analyses of the recent multi-lab investigation of the ACE (Morey et al., 2021), evidence for individual differences in the ACE was found. However, further analyses indicate that these differences are likely due to item-specific variability and the specific way in which items were assigned to conditions in the counterbalancing lists.

The limits of automatic sensorimotor processing during word processing: investigations with repeated linguistic experience, memory consolidation during sleep, and rich linguistic learning contexts.

While a number of studies have repeatedly demonstrated an automatic activation of sensorimotor experience during language processing in the form of action-congruency effects, as predicted by theories of grounded cognition, more recent research has not found these effects for words that were just learned from linguistic input alone, without sensorimotor experience with their referents. In the present study, we investigate whether this absence of effects can be attributed to a lack of repeated experience and consolidation of the associations between words and sensorimotor experience in memory. To address these issues, we conducted four experiments in which (1 and 2) participants engaged in two separate learning phases in which they learned novel words from language alone, with an intervening period of memory-consolidating sleep, and (3 and 4) we employed familiar words whose referents speakers have no direct experience with (such as plankton). However, we again did not observe action-congruency effects in subsequent test phases in any of the experiments. This indicates that direct sensorimotor experience with word referents is a necessary requirement for automatic sensorimotor activation during word processing.

The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview.

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.

The Role of Predictability During Negation Processing in Truth-Value Judgment Tasks.

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., "The square/circle is (not) white"). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.

Conceptual representation of real-world surface material: Early integration with linguistic-labels indicated in the N400-component.

Research in perception in the visual and auditory domains has traditionally focused on investigating highly controlled artificial stimulus material. However, a key feature of our perceptual system is the ease with which the input of a wide set of naturalistic co-occurring information is dealt with. This study investigated whether, during perception of real-world surface material, a conceptual representation is built that has the potential to interact with a linguistic description of the material directly. Short sentences were presented (e.g., This surface is smooth) followed by a matching or mismatching picture of a real-world surface material. The results showed early cross-modal integration effects during material surface perception in an N400-like potential, originating approximately 280 ms after stimulus presentation. Overall, these findings suggest a rather early influence of linguistic information on material perception, suggesting that in line with object representation, real-world materials are represented in the brain in a format that allows interaction with non-visual information.