Overlap in meaning is a stronger predictor of semantic activation in GPT-3 than in humans.

Modern large language models generate texts that are virtually indistinguishable from those written by humans and achieve near-human performance in comprehension and reasoning tests. Yet, their complexity makes it difficult to explain and predict their functioning. We examined a state-of-the-art language model (GPT-3) using lexical decision tasks widely used to study the structure of semantic memory in humans. The results of four analyses showed that GPT-3's patterns of semantic activation are broadly similar to those observed in humans, showing significantly higher semantic activation in related (e.g., "lime-lemon") word pairs than in other-related (e.g., "sour-lemon") or unrelated (e.g., "tourist-lemon") word pairs. However, there are also significant differences between GPT-3 and humans. GPT-3's semantic activation is better predicted by similarity in words' meaning (i.e., semantic similarity) rather than their co-occurrence in the language (i.e., associative similarity). This suggests that GPT-3's semantic network is organized around word meaning rather than their co-occurrence in text.

Who is poor? Analysis of social representations in an Argentine sample / Quem é pobre? Análise das representações sociais em uma amostra Argentina / ¿Quién es pobre? Análisis de las representaciones sociales en una muestra argentina

Different organizations register alarming poverty rates in Argentina. However, there may be differences in who is considered poor according to these measurements and who is considered poor by society, from common sense knowledge. This work analyzes the social representations of people living in poverty in a sample of 605 Argentines, using the free-word association technique. The results suggest that the poor person is first understood as someone who suffers from hunger, a definition that corresponds to indigence according to the official entity that measures poverty and indigence in Argentina. However, while the core of the representation manifests a significant presence of elements of monetary poverty and its effects on nutrition (hunger), the peripheral system shows the deficit in various social rights, such as education, housing, work, and health. Following these results, it is argued that equating poverty with indigence would render the situation of millions of people in Argentina invisible. (AU)

Diferentes organizações registram índices alarmantes de pobreza na Argentina. No entanto, pode haver diferenças entre quem é considerado pobre de acordo com essas medidas e quem é considerado pobre na sociedade, pelo senso comum. Este trabalho analisa as representações sociais de pessoas em situação de pobreza em uma amostra de 605 argentinos/as por meio da técnica de associação de palavras. Os resultados sugerem que a pessoa que vive na pobreza é entendida principalmente como alguém que passa fome, definição que corresponde à indigência segundo o órgão oficial que mede a pobreza e a indigência na Argentina. Não obstante, enquanto no núcleo da representação se identifica a presença de elementos da pobreza monetária e seus efeitos sobre a alimentação (fome), no sistema periférico se identifica elementos relacionados à violação de direitos sociais, como educação, moradia, trabalho e saúde. Conclui-se que igualar a pobreza à indigência tornaria invisível a situação de milhões de pessoas na Argentina. (AU)

Distintos organismos registran tasas alarmantes de pobreza en Argentina. Sin embargo, pueden existir diferencias en quién es considerado pobre según estas mediciones y quiénes lo son para la sociedad, desde el sentido común. Este trabajo analiza las representaciones sociales sobre las personas en situación de pobreza en una muestra de 605 argentinos/as, administrando la técnica de asociación de palabras. Los resultados sugieren que la persona en situación de pobreza es entendida primeramente como alguien que sufre hambre, definición que corresponde a indigencia según el organismo oficial que mide la pobreza y la indigencia en Argentina. No obstante, mientras que en el núcleo de la representación social tiene una importante presencia la pobreza monetaria y sus efectos sobre la alimentación (hambre), en el sistema periférico se ubican elementos relativos a la vulneración de derechos sociales, como la educación, la vivienda, el trabajo y la salud. Se concluye que equiparar a la pobreza con la indigencia invisibilizaría la situación de millones de personas en Argentina. (AU)

Disentangling the Effects of Backward/Forward Associative Strength and Theme Identifiability in False Memory / Aislando el Papel de la Fuerza Asociativa Directa e Inversa y la Identificabilidad del Tema Sobre los Recuerdos Falsos

Background: False memory has been extensively studied using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Despitethe robustness of the effect, there is wide variability in the results, which is not fully understood. Method: Threeexperiments independently examined the role of backward associative strength (BAS), forward associative strength(FAS), and theme identifiability (ID) on false memories. In Experiment 1, lists varied in BAS while controlling FAS andID. In Experiment 2, FAS was manipulated while BAS and ID were controlled. Finally, in Experiment 3, lists variedin ID while controlling BAS and FAS. Data was analyzed using both frequentist and Bayesian analyses. Results: Wefound false memories in all three experiments. Specifically, false recognition was higher in high-BAS than in low-BASlists in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, false recognition was higher in high-FAS than in low-FAS lists. In Experiment3, false recognition was lower in high-ID than in low-ID lists. Conclusions: These findings suggest that both BAS andFAS—variables that promote error-inflating processes—and ID—which promotes error-editing processes—contributeindependently to the production of false memories. Splitting apart the role of these variables helps to understand thevariability of false memories and to extrapolate DRM tasks to explore other cognitive domains.(AU)

Antecedentes: las memorias falsas se han estudiado ampliamente utilizando el paradigma Deese/Roediger-McDermott. A pesar de la robustez del efecto, existe una amplia variabilidad de resultados que todavía no se comprendecompletamente. Método: tres experimentos examinaron independientemente el papel de la fuerza asociativa inversa(BAS), fuerza asociativa directa (FAS) e identificabilidad del tema (ID) en el reconocimiento falso (RF). Primero, semanipuló el BAS mientras se controló FAS e ID (Experimento 1). Segundo, se manipuló el FAS mientras se controlóBAS e ID (Experimento 2). Finalmente, se manipuló ID mientras se controló BAS y FAS (Experimento 3). Se utilizaronanálisis frecuentistas y bayesianos. Resultados: el RF fue mayor en las listas de alto que bajo BAS (Experimento 1), yalto que bajo FAS (Experimento 2). En cambio, el RF fue menor en las listas de alto ID que bajo ID (Experimento 3).Conclusiones: tanto BAS como FAS, variables que promueven procesos de inflación del error, pero también ID, quienpromueve procesos de edición del error, contribuyen de forma independiente a la producción de memorias falsas. Aislarel papel de estas variables ayuda a comprender la variabilidad de los falsos recuerdos y a extrapolar las tareas DRM paraexplorar otros dominios cognitivos.(AU)

Alquimia das palavras: extraindo o tempo das palavras / Alchemy of words: extracting time from words / Alquimia de las palabras: extracción del tiempo de las palabras

O presente artigo reflete sobre o poder e as substâncias que formam as palavras. Uma dificuldade, palavras a falar sobre palavras. Ideia, o tempo contido nas palavras. A poesia é a bússola na procura do caminho, e a alquimia, o mapa metafórico. O tempo como aspecto central, o tempo escondido nas palavras. Desenvolve-se a extração em paralelo à alquimia e a seus processos básicos, para se chegar ao espírito divino da matéria. Os estudos e conceitos da alquimia de C. G. Jung e E. Edinger são explorados para comparação entre as projeções de alquimistas e poetas. Sentir o tempo nas palavras, ajustar a escuta poética da clínica. Na poesia o tempo funciona diferentemente; o poeta é o que se aproxima da alma, ao juntar palavras. São essas palavras que quebram a rigidez dos relógios.

This article ponders on the power and substances that form words. Using words to talk about words is a difficult endeavor. Ideas are time contained in words, poetry, the compass in the search of the way, and alchemy, the metaphorical map. Time is a central aspect, as time is hidden in words. Extraction is developed in parallel with alchemy and its basic processes in order to arrive at the divine spirit of matter. The studies and concepts of alchemy of C. G. Jung and E. Edinger are explored in comparing the projections of alchemists and poets. Feeling time in the words to adjust poetic listening in clinic activities. In poetry, time works differently; the poet is the one who approaches the soul by putting words together. It is these words that break the iron frule of clocks.

Este artículo reflexiona sobre el poder y las sustancias que forman las palabras. Una dificultad, palabras hablando de palabras. Idea, el tiempo contenido en las palabras. La poesía es la brújula en la búsqueda del camino, y la alquimia, el mapa metafórico. El tiempo como aspecto central, el tiempo escondido en las palabras. La extracción se desarrolla en paralelo con la alquimia y sus procesos básicos, para llegar al espíritu divino de la materia. Se exploran los estudios y conceptos de alquimia de C. G. Jung y E. Edinger para comparar las proyecciones de alquimistas y poetas. Siente el tiempo en las palabras, ajusta la escucha poética de la clínica. En la poesía el tiempo funciona de otra manera; el poeta es el que se acerca al alma juntando palabras. Son estas palabras las que rompen la rigidez de los relojes.

How did early North American clinical psychologists get their first personality test? Carl Gustav Jung, the Zurich School of Psychiatry, and the development of the "Word Association Test" (1898-1909).

Clinical psychology emerged in the United States during the first decades of the 20th century. Although they focused on intelligence tests, starting around 1905 certain clinical psychologists pursued personality assessment through a specific, nonintellectual kind of test: the word association test as devised by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich. The test was a key device in the professionalization of North American psychiatry and psychology during the early 20th century: from 1905 onward it was acknowledged, discussed, and applied by experimental and clinical psychologists. However, Jung's original experiments and the development of the test itself have received only superficial or casual attention by historians of science. This article attempts to provide a critical, streamlined, and detailed account on the origin, development, and substance of the Zurich word association experiments. By drawing on heretofore overlooked primary sources, I offer a new, critical perspective on the emergence and development of Jung's test while engaging with its main theoretical and methodological aspects. I show that the test was neither Jung's sole creation nor did it consist of a simple, straightforward set of tasks. Contrarily, it was the result of a highly collaborative, multilayered institutionalized research program on linguistic and mental associations. The program, its data and its assumptions fueled several debates and data-driven discussions at Zurich, precluding the test from achieving a stable, standardized character. As a result, the history of Jung's program reflects both the advances and the limitations of early 20th-century personality testing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The potential of invasive and non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation to improve verbal memory performance in epilepsy patients.

It has been demonstrated that acute vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) improves word recognition memory in epilepsy patients. Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) has gained interest as a non-invasive alternative to improve cognition. In this prospective randomized cross-over study, we investigated the effect of both invasive VNS and taVNS on verbal memory performance in 15 patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. All patients conducted a word recognition memory paradigm in 3 conditions: VNS ON, VNS OFF and taVNS (3-period 3-treatment cross-over study design). For each condition, patients memorized 21 highlighted words from text paragraphs. Afterwards, the intervention was delivered for 30 s. Immediate recall and delayed recognition scores were obtained for each condition. This memory paradigm was repeated after 6 weeks of VNS therapy in 2 conditions: VNS ON and VNS OFF (2-period 2-treatment cross-over study design). Acute VNS and taVNS did not improve verbal memory performance. Immediate recall and delayed recognition scores were significantly improved after 6 weeks of VNS treatment irrespective of the acute intervention. We can conclude that the previously described positive effects of invasive VNS on verbal memory performance could not be replicated with invasive VNS and taVNS. An improved verbal memory performance was seen after 6 weeks of VNS treatment, suggesting that longer and more repetitive stimulation of the vagal pathway is required to modulate verbal memory performance.Clinical trial registration number: NCT05031208.

An Investigation on the Academic Burden of Chinese Students Ranging from Primary Schools to Universities Based on a Word Association Test in Guangdong Province.

China's basic education and higher education are currently facing policies aimed at reducing and increasing the academic burden, respectively. In this context, we first review and assess the methods of measuring students' academic burden and then apply the implicit association test for the first time to the academic burden of Chinese students from primary school to university under a unified framework. The results demonstrates that students' academic burden increases with the school stage, and thus university students face a greater burden than primary and high school students, and that learning attitude fully mediates the relationship between objective and subjective views of academic burden. These results suggest the three policy approaches of implementing a management system for classifying academic burden, considering how to improve students' learning quality, and developing their mental health education, thus providing a reference and inspiration for research and practice in the field of academic burden.

Analysis of English free association network reveals mechanisms of efficient solution of Remote Association Tests.

We study correlations between the structure and properties of a free association network of the English language, and solutions of psycholinguistic Remote Association Tests (RATs). We show that average hardness of individual RATs is largely determined by relative positions of test words (stimuli and response) on the free association network. We argue that the solution of RATs can be interpreted as a first passage search problem on a network whose vertices are words and links are associations between words. We propose different heuristic search algorithms and demonstrate that in "easily-solving" RATs (those that are solved in 15 seconds by more than 64% subjects) the solution is governed by "strong" network links (i.e. strong associations) directly connecting stimuli and response, and thus the efficient strategy consist in activating such strong links. In turn, the most efficient mechanism of solving medium and hard RATs consists of preferentially following sequence of "moderately weak" associations.

Vowel dyslexia in Turkish: A window to the complex structure of the sublexical route.

We report on developmental vowel dyslexia, a type of dyslexia that selectively affects the reading aloud of vowel letters. We identified this dyslexia in 55 Turkish-readers aged 9-10, and made an in-depth multiple-case analysis of the reading of 17 participants whose vowel dyslexia was relatively selective. These participants made significantly more vowel errors (vowel substitution, omission, migration, and addition) than age-matched controls, and significantly more errors in vowel letters than in consonants. Vowel harmony, a pivotal property of Turkish phonology, was intact and the majority of their vowel errors yielded harmonic responses. The transparent character of Turkish orthography indicates that vowel dyslexia is not related to ambiguity in vowel conversion. The dyslexia did not result from a deficit in the phonological-output stage, as the participants did not make vowel errors in nonword repetition or in repeating words they had read with a vowel error. The locus of the deficit was not in the orthographic-visual-analyzer either, as their same-different decision on words differing in vowels was intact, and so was their written-word comprehension. They made significantly more errors on nonwords than on words, indicating that their deficit was in vowel processing in the sublexical route. Given that their single-vowels conversion was intact, and that they showed an effect of the number of vowels, we conclude that their deficit is in a vowel-specific buffer in the sublexical route. They did not make vowel errors within suffixes, indicating that suffixes are converted as wholes in a separate sublexical sub-route. These results have theoretical implications for the dual-route model: they indicate that the sublexical route converts vowels and consonants separately, that the sublexical route includes a vowel buffer, and a separate morphological conversion route. The results also indicate that types of dyslexia can be detected in transparent languages given detailed error-analysis and dyslexia-relevant stimuli.

Grid-like and distance codes for representing word meaning in the human brain.

Relational information about items in memory is thought to be represented in our brain thanks to an internal comprehensive model, also referred to as a "cognitive map". In the human neuroimaging literature, two signatures of bi-dimensional cognitive maps have been reported: the grid-like code and the distance-dependent code. While these kinds of representation were previously observed during spatial navigation and, more recently, during processing of perceptual stimuli, it is still an open question whether they also underlie the representation of the most basic items of language: words. Here we taught human participants the meaning of novel words as arbitrary labels for a set of audiovisual objects varying orthogonally in size and sound. The novel words were therefore conceivable as points in a navigable 2D map of meaning. While subjects performed a word comparison task, we recorded their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By applying a combination of representational similarity and fMRI-adaptation analyses, we found evidence of (i) a grid-like code, in the right postero-medial entorhinal cortex, representing the relative angular positions of words in the word space, and (ii) a distance-dependent code, in medial prefrontal, orbitofrontal, and mid-cingulate cortices, representing the Euclidean distance between words. Additionally, we found evidence that the brain also separately represents the single dimensions of word meaning: their implied size, encoded in visual areas, and their implied sound, in Heschl's gyrus/Insula. These results support the idea that the meaning of words, when they are organized along two dimensions, is represented in the human brain across multiple maps of different dimensionality. SIGNIFICANT STATEMENT: How do we represent the meaning of words and perform comparative judgements on them in our brain? According to influential theories, concepts are conceivable as points of an internal map (where distance represents similarity) that, as the physical space, can be mentally navigated. Here we use fMRI to show that when humans compare newly learnt words, they recruit a grid-like and a distance code, the same types of neural codes that, in mammals, represent relations between locations in the environment and support physical navigation between them.

Distinguishing the Impact of Age on Semantic and Nonsemantic Associations in Episodic Memory.

OBJECTIVES: Refreshing, or the act of briefly foregrounding recently presented but now perceptually absent representations, has been identified as a possible source of age differences in working memory and episodic memory. We investigated whether the refreshing deficit contributes to the well-known age-related deficit for retrieving nonsemantic associations, but has no impact on existing semantic associations. METHOD: Younger and older adults judged the relatedness of stimulus word pairs (e.g., pink-blue or pink-cop) after repeating or refreshing one of the words. During a later source recognition memory test, participants determined whether each item recognized as old was presented on the left or right (nonsemantic source memory) and presented in a related or unrelated pair (semantic source memory). The data were analyzed using a hierarchical Bayesian implementation of a multinomial model of multidimensional source memory. RESULTS: Neither age group exhibited a refreshing benefit to nonsemantic or semantic source memory parameters. There was a large age difference in nonsemantic source memory, but no age difference in semantic source memory. DISCUSSION: The study suggests that the nature of the association is most important to episodic memory performance in older age, irrespective of refreshing, such that source memory is unimpaired for semantically meaningful information.

Expanding the Scope of Implicit Personality Assessment: An Examination of the Questionnaire-Based Implicit Association Test (qIAT).

Self-report questionnaires can only yield information that people are able and willing to report, but implicit assessment methods are not commonly used in mainstream personality research. The Questionnaire-based Implicit Association Test (qIAT) was designed to address the limitations associated with the conventional self-concept IAT, and it enables an indirect assessment that is based on the items of standard self-reports. The present studies examined the psychometric properties of the qIAT across two personality constructs. Study 1 (N = 528) provided support for the internal consistency, test-retest reliability and convergent and discriminant validity of the qIAT that measured extraversion. Study 2 (N = 164) supported the reliability and validity of the qIAT assessment of conscientiousness, which predicted who returned to complete the second session of the study two weeks later, for which participants were paid in advance. This same prediction effect was marginally significant in Study 3 (N = 200), and across both Studies 2 and 3 the qIAT prediction of the criterion behavior was incremental to the parallel self-report questionnaire. Taken together, findings support the reliability and validity of the qIAT, which enables the indirect measurement of a wide variety of distinct personality constructs, currently measured only by self-report scales.

Unitization facilitates familiarity-based cross-language associative recognition.

The unitization effect means a phenomenon in which familiarity can contribute to associative recognition judgments when pairs of items are treated as a single entity rather than two separate items. Cumulative evidences suggested that the unitization effect was not influenced by the type of language, and this effect could be generalized to bilinguals when they performed an associative recognition in their second language. In the present study, the influence of familiarity on cross-language associative retrieval under unitization and the underlying neurophysiological mechanism behind this effect were investigated. Participants completed two "study-test" tasks presented in intralinguistic (from Uygur to Uygur) or interlinguistic assignment (from Chinese to Uygur) respectively. The study showed that: (1) during intralinguistic assignments, both FN400 and LPC were found under unitization for balanced and unbalanced bilinguals, while an LPC but not FN400 was found under non-unitization. (2) During interlinguistic assignments, both FN400 and LPC were found under unitization for balanced bilinguals. However, an LPC but not FN400 was found under unitization for unbalanced bilinguals. Collectively, these results indicated that unitization facilitated familiarity to support cross-language retrieval. In particular, the effects of familiarity on cross-language retrieval were mediated by the second language proficiency.

Gaming experience affects the interpretation of ambiguous words.

Rodd et al. (2016) report that recreational rowers' acquisition of sport-related terminology affected their interpretation of words that have both rowing-related and non-rowing-related meanings (e.g., crab). The extent to which the rowing- and non-rowing-related meanings were accessible to the participants depended on experiential factors, such as how long the participant had been a rower, and how long it had been since they last rowed. We present two experiments that attempt to replicate these findings with another group of hobbyists, namely video game players. Experiment 1 examined the differences in word meaning choice between gamers and non-gamers. Participation in video-gaming lead to participants generating more gaming-related word meanings in a word association task. Experiment 2 further examined the effects of video gaming experience on the lexical representation of gaming-related words. Participants who had spent more years as gamers were more likely to produce gaming-related word meanings in a word association task. The effect of time spent gaming was no longer significant when we took into account whether the participant engaged with video-game related media (such as YouTube channels or gaming-related message boards). This finding helps us to refine our understanding of the results reported by Rodd et al. (2016), suggesting that it may not be the time spent in an activity that affects the interpretation of ambiguous words, but rather the specific exposure to activity-related vocabulary.

Individual differences in working memory capacity moderate effects of post-learning activity on memory consolidation over the long term.

Similar to sleeping after learning, a brief period of wakeful resting after encoding new information supports memory retention in contrast to task-related cognition. Recent evidence suggests that working memory capacity (WMC) is related to sleep-dependent declarative memory consolidation. We tested whether WMC moderates the effect of a brief period of wakeful resting compared to performing a distractor task subsequent to encoding a word list. Participants encoded and immediately recalled a word list followed by either an 8 min wakeful resting period (eyes closed, relaxed) or by performing an adapted version of the d2 test of attention for 8 min. At the end of the experimental session (after 12-24 min) and again, after 7 days, participants were required to complete a surprise free recall test of both word lists. Our results show that interindividual differences in WMC are a central moderating factor for the effect of post-learning activity on memory retention. The difference in word retention between a brief period of wakeful resting versus performing a selective attention task subsequent to encoding increased in higher WMC individuals over a retention interval of 12-24 min, as well as over 7 days. This effect was reversed in lower WMC individuals. Our results extend findings showing that WMC seems not only to moderate sleep-related but also wakeful resting-related memory consolidation.

Neural sources of letter and Vernier acuity.

Visual acuity can be measured in many different ways, including with letters and Vernier offsets. Prior psychophysical work has suggested that the two acuities are strongly linked given that they both depend strongly on retinal eccentricity and both are similarly affected in amblyopia. Here we used high-density EEG recordings to ask whether the underlying neural sources are common as suggested by the psychophysics or distinct. To measure visual acuity for letters, we recorded evoked potentials to 3 Hz alternations between intact and scrambled text comprised of letters of varying size. To measure visual acuity for Vernier offsets, we recorded evoked potentials to 3 Hz alternations between bar gratings with and without a set of Vernier offsets. Both alternation types elicited robust activity at the 3 Hz stimulus frequency that scaled in amplitude with both letter and offset size, starting near threshold. Letter and Vernier offset responses differed in both their scalp topography and temporal dynamics. The earliest evoked responses to letters occurred on lateral occipital visual areas, predominantly over the left hemisphere. Later responses were measured at electrodes over early visual cortex, suggesting that letter structure is first extracted in second-tier extra-striate areas and that responses over early visual areas are due to feedback. Responses to Vernier offsets, by contrast, occurred first at medial occipital electrodes, with responses at later time-points being more broadly distributed-consistent with feedforward pathway mediation. The previously observed commonalities between letter and Vernier acuity may be due to common bottlenecks in early visual cortex but not because the two tasks are subserved by a common network of visual areas.

Preliminary development of an implicit association test to measure body dissatisfaction and predict disordered eating behaviors.

We conducted a preliminary test of a novel implicit association test for body dissatisfaction (BD-IAT). We predicted that BD-IAT would correlate with self-reported BD and predict later eating disorder (ED) attitudes. Female undergraduates (N = 145) self-reported BD and ED attitudes. In the BD-IAT, participants sorted words related to "satisfaction" and "dissatisfaction" to opposite sides of a computer screen. Participants categorized pictures of themselves to the side of the screen with the word "Me," which appeared with the "satisfied" or "dissatisfied" category in separate blocks. The BD-IAT measured the strength of the association between a participant's own body and dissatisfaction. The BD-IAT correlated positively with the EDI-BD (r = 0.21, p < 0.05), supporting its convergent validity. The BD-IAT predicted ED attitudes at one-week follow-up, controlling for explicit BD and baseline ED (b = 0.58, SE = 0.23, t = 2.57, p = .01); IAT scores uniquely accounted for 4.7 % of the variance in ED at one-week follow-up. These results provide preliminary evidence for the BD-IAT as an implicit measure of BD and suggest that it may predict future ED attitudes above and beyond explicit BD. Directions for future work aimed at continued development of this task are discussed.

Bliss is blue and bleak is grey: Abstract word-colour associations influence objective performance even when not task relevant.

Humans associate abstract words with physical stimulus dimensions, such as linking upward locations with positive concepts (e.g., happy = up). These associations manifest both via subjective reports of associations and on objective performance metrics. Humans also report subjective associations between colours and abstract words (e.g., joy is linked to yellow). Here we tested whether such associations manifest on objective task performance, even when not task-relevant. Across three experiments, participants were presented with abstract words in physical colours that were either congruent with previously-reported subjective word-colour associations (e.g., victory in red and unhappy in blue), or were incongruent (e.g., victory in blue and unhappy in red). In Experiment 1, participants' task was to identify the valence of words. This congruency manipulation systematically affected objective task performance. In Experiment 2, participants completed two blocks, a valence-identification and a colour-identification task block. Both tasks produced congruency effects on performance, however, the results of the colour identification block could have reflected learning effects (i.e., associating the more common congruent colour with the word). This issue was rectified in Experiment 3, whereby participants completed the same two tasks as Experiment 2, but now matched congruent and incongruent pairs were used for both tasks. Again, both tasks produced reliable congruency effects. Item analyses in each experiment revealed that these effects demonstrated a degree of item specificity. Overall, there was clear evidence that at least some abstract word-colour pairings can systematically affect behaviour.

The investigation of semantic memory deficit in chronic tinnitus: a behavioral report / Investigação do déficit de memória semântica no zumbido crônico: um relato comportamental

Abstract Introduction: Tinnitus is a central auditory disorder in which different processing systems are involved as a network. One of these networks is memory. Previous studies have demonstrated some deficits in various types of memory in chronic tinnitus. Objectives: The main purpose of the present study was to investigate the semantic memory, which is not yet investigated in the tinnitus population. Methods: In this case-control study, 15 subjects with chronic tinnitus and 16 matched healthy controls were included. 40 semantically related and 40 semantically unrelated word pairs were presented to the participants in a counter-balanced fashion. They were asked to make decision about their semantic relatedness. Then the participants' reaction times and the accuracy of responses were calculated. Results: Mean of reaction times were significantly longer in the tinnitus group (M = 1034 ms, SD = 0.31) compared to the control group (Mean = 1016 ms, SD = 0.13), p < 0.05. However, no significant difference was found for the mean percentage of correct responses between the two groups. Conclusion: The current study provided behavioral evidence that chronic tinnitus can affect the semantic memory. Such behavioral outcomes may provide new insights into more research activities in the field of electrophysiology and neuroimaging in the tinnitus population.

Resumo Introdução: O zumbido é um distúrbio auditivo central, no qual diferentes sistemas de processamento estão envolvidos como em uma rede. Uma dessas redes é a memória. Estudos anteriores demonstraram alguns déficits em vários tipos de memória no zumbido crônico. Objetivos: Investigar a memória semântica, que ainda não foi investigada na população com zumbido. Método: Neste estudo de caso-controle, 15 indivíduos com zumbido crônico e 16 controles saudáveis pareados foram incluídos; 40 pares de palavras semanticamente relacionados e 40 semanticamente não relacionados foram apresentados aos participantes de forma contrabalançada. Eles foram instruídos a tomar decisões sobre sua relação semântica. Em seguida, os tempos de reação dos participantes e a precisão das respostas foram calculados. Resultados: A média dos tempos de reação foi significativamente maior no grupo com zumbido (M = 1,034 ms, DP = 0,31) em comparação ao grupo controle (média = 1,016 ms, DP = 0,13), p< 0,05. Entretanto, nenhuma diferença significante foi encontrada para a porcentagem média de respostas corretas entre os dois grupos. Conclusão: O presente estudo forneceu evidências comportamentais de que o zumbido crônico pode afetar a memória semântica. Tais resultados comportamentais podem levar a novas percepções em mais atividades de pesquisa no campo da eletrofisiologia e neuroimagem na população com zumbido.

Social representations of female sex workers about their sexuality.

OBJECTIVES: To know the social representations of female sex workers about their sexuality. METHODS: Qualitative study based on the Theory of Social Representations. Thirty-nine women from a health region of Alto Sertão Produtivo Baiano - Brazil agreed to participate. For the production of empirical data, the techniques of Free Word Association and in-depth interviews were used. The answers were analyzed based on Constellation Target Content Analysis and Semantic Content Analysis. RESULTS: Two thematic categories emerged: "negative representation of sexuality"; "my pleasure is the money". Therefore, the theme sexuality and meanings derived from the social representations elaborated by the sex workers about sexuality, based on their experiences and daily life, showed that the work involved a negative representation of sexuality when associated with sexual satisfaction with the client, in addition to the allusion to sex as a source of income. CONCLUSIONS: The social representations about sexuality constructed by sex workers are linked to the feeling of denial of pleasure and obtaining money for subsistence. Reflecting on sexuality points out ways to rethink the care to be provided for a stigmatized and vulnerable group.