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Machines have achieved a broad and growing set of linguistic competencies, thanks to recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Psychologists have shown increasing interest in such models, comparing their output to psychological judgments such as similarity, association, priming, and comprehension, raising the question of whether the models could serve as psychological theories. In this article, we compare how humans and machines represent the meaning of words. We argue that contemporary NLP systems are fairly successful models of human word similarity, but they fall short in many other respects. Current models are too strongly linked to the text-based patterns in large corpora, and too weakly linked to the desires, goals, and beliefs that people express through words. Word meanings must also be grounded in perception and action and be capable of flexible combinations in ways that current systems are not. We discuss more promising approaches to grounding NLP systems and argue that they will be more successful with a more human-like, conceptual basis for word meaning., Comment: In press at Psychological Review

Perceivers spontaneously segment ongoing activity into discrete events. This segmentation is important for the moment-by-moment understanding of events, but may also be critical for how events are encoded into episodic memory. In 3 experiments, we used priming to test the possibility that perceptual event boundaries organize memory for everyday activity into episodic units. Viewers watched movies of everyday activities, such as someone washing a car, and then performed a yes-no recognition task using pictures taken from the movies. Some target pictures were preceded by a prime picture taken from 5 s previously in the movie. This produced priming, reducing response times for the target picture. Priming was greater when the prime was part of the same perceptual event as the target than when it was part of a different event, suggesting that event structure organizes episodic memory. This effect persisted when the sequence of activity was scrambled during encoding, which suggests that it reflects, in part, knowledge about event types and not just the specifics of a given episode. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

This article reports 7 studies showing that God primes inhibit self-concept accessibility. Study 1A provided the first supportive evidence using undergraduate samples. Study 1B replicated the findings using working adult participants. Study 2A to 2C showed that the inhibitory effect of the God concept on implicit self-concepts was not due to concepts related to love, power, hope, religion, devil, and father. Study 3 found the same inhibitory effect when the God prime was subliminally presented. Study 4 showed that God concept priming influenced implicit self-representations, but not other types of implicit representations. Finally, a meta-analysis of our findings reveal a large effect of priming. In addition, the effect was consistent across different religious affiliations. These findings provide evidence at the social–cognitive level that activation of God concepts can induce lower self-orientation: a possible mechanism for religious self-transcendence.

Visual search is a fundamental element of human behavior and is predominantly studied in a laboratory setting using static displays. However, real-life search is often an extended process taking place in dynamic environments. We have designed a dynamic-search task in order to incorporate the temporal dimension into visual search. Using this task, we tested how participants learn and utilize spatiotemporal regularities embedded within the environment to guide performance. Participants searched for eight instances of a target that faded in and out of a display containing similarly transient distractors. In each trial, four of the eight targets appeared in a temporally predictable fashion with one target appearing in each of four spatially separated quadrants. The other four targets were spatially and temporally unpredictable. Participants' performance was significantly better for spatiotemporally predictable compared to unpredictable targets (Experiments 1-4). The effects were reliable over different patterns of spatiotemporal predictability (Experiment 2) and primarily reflected long-term learning over trials (Experiments 3, 4), although single-trial priming effects also contributed (Experiment 4). Eye-movement recordings (Experiment 1) revealed that spatiotemporal regularities guide attention proactively and dynamically. Taken together, our results show that regularities across both space and time can guide visual search and this guidance can primarily be attributed to robust long-term representations of these regularities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

In this study we asked whether nonwords created by transposing two phonemes (/biksɔt/) are perceived as being more similar to their base words (/biskɔt/) than nonwords created by substituting two phonemes (/bipfɔt/). Using the short-term phonological priming and a lexical-decision task, Experiment 1 showed that transposed-phoneme nonword primes lead to shorter RTs on the target base words than substituted-phoneme nonword primes. Using a single-presentation lexical-decision task, Experiment 2 showed that transposed-phoneme nonwords lead to longer "no" decision responses than substituted-phoneme nonwords. In both Experiments 1 and 2, the transposed-phoneme effect was observed when the transposed phonemes were adjacent (/biksɔt/-/biskɔt/) but not when they were distant (/ʃoloka/-/ʃokola/). Our findings suggest that nonwords created by transposing adjacent phonemes in real words generate more activation of the lexical representations associated with the base words than do matched control nonwords. More generally, our findings present a challenge for models of spoken word recognition that code for the precise order of speech segments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Although theories of personality and human behavior have long assumed that the self is affectively complex, widely used indirect measures of implicit self-evaluations have largely focused on the robustness and cultural universality of the self's positivity. Such indirect measures assess evaluations on a single continuum, ranging from positive to negative. Thus, they focus on the self's relative positivity and are inherently incapable of assessing whether the self is associated with good and bad. Using the well-established evaluative priming task, the present work tested the hypothesis that positive implicit self-evaluations coexist with an inkling of negative implicit self-evaluations. Studies 1 and 2 empirically demonstrated that priming the self facilitated the classification of both positive and negative targets (bivalent-priming). In contrast, replicating classic findings, priming a personally significant, liked object facilitated the classification of positive targets and inhibited the classification of negative targets (univalent-priming). Study 3 showed that the bivalent-priming triggered by self-primes cannot be explained by alternative accounts (e.g., arousal, vigilance). Meta-analyses of all studies attests to the robustness and reproducibility of self-primes triggering both positive and negative implicit evaluations. Moreover, tests estimating heterogeneity in the strength of implicit self-evaluations indicated that individual differences in nonclinical, healthy individuals may be limited, possibly reflecting measurement limitations, the nature of implicit self-evaluations, or both. Overall, the present work shines a spotlight on a previously undocumented effect: Despite the self's robust net positivity, the self reliably triggers negative implicit self-evaluations. Implications for the conceptualization, assessment, and consequences of implicit self-evaluations are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The issue of bilingual phonological access remains unclear for bilinguals with cross-script language systems, which is especially true when the time course of phonological activation is involved. To investigate the time course of cross-script phonological activation, the present study asked Chinese-English bilinguals to complete a word naming task that was conducted in a forward-masked phonological priming paradigm in three stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions. By comparing the interlingual and intralingual phonological priming effects in a within-subjects design, we found that (a) target naming in Chinese and English was facilitated by a phonologically similar English or Chinese prime in the three SOA conditions (43 ms, 75 ms, and 150 ms) and the facilitation effect of the prime reached the peak when the pronunciation of the prime-target pair most resembled each other and (b) manipulation of the SOAs affected both the naming latencies of target words and the sizes of the phonological priming effect. In particular, naming latencies in each prime-target type displayed an increasing tendency as the SOA prolonged. Moreover, despite the varied sizes of the priming effect in the three SOA conditions, we found a consistent pattern that the priming effects in two interlingual conditions resembled their respective intralingual conditions along the time course. Taken together, these findings provide strong support for an integrated phonological representation of bilinguals and further extend the language nonselective access hypothesis to language pairs with very different orthographic systems. Implications for the manipulation of the SOAs in the masked priming paradigm are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Schizophrenia is widely thought to involve elevated distractibility, which may reflect a general impairment in top-down inhibitory processes. Schizophrenia also appears to involve increased priming of previously performed actions. Here, we used a highly refined eye-tracking paradigm that makes it possible to concurrently assess distractibility, inhibition, and priming. In both healthy control subjects (HCS, N = 41) and people with schizophrenia (PSZ, N = 46), we found that initial saccades were actually less likely to be directed toward a salient "singleton" distractor than toward less salient distractors, reflecting top-down suppression of the singleton. Remarkably, this oculomotor suppression effect was as strong or stronger in PSZ than in HCS, indicating intact inhibitory control. In addition, saccades were frequently directed to the location of the previous-trial target in both groups, but this priming effect was much stronger in PSZ than in HCS. Indeed, PSZ directed gaze toward the location of the previous-trial target as often as they directed gaze to the location of the current-trial target. These results demonstrate that-at least in the context of visual search-PSZ are no more distractable than HCS and are fully capable of inhibiting salient-but-irrelevant stimuli. However, PSZ do exhibit exaggerated priming, focusing on recently attended locations even when this is not beneficial for goal attainment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotional responses to aversive stimuli may be more mandatory than emotional responses to appetitive stimuli, and extant theorizing suggests that negative reactions may be more peaked at maximum intensity. Parameters of this type were investigated within two experiments (total N = 198) in which emotional images were presented and re-presented as participants indicated their moment-to-moment feeling changes in response to both appetitive and aversive images. Negative emotional reactions were more detectable, with more definitive onsets and peaks, and peak amplitudes were systematically higher in the context of aversive stimuli. Furthermore, stimulus repetition enhanced negative emotional responding in terms of both faster onset times and more pronounced peak amplitudes. Although behavioral activation and behavioral inhibition motivation modulated the emotional onset and peak reactivity metrics, such individual differences did not interact with the repetition effects that were observed. These results highlight several dynamic negativity effects that distinguish positive versus negative emotional reactivity processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Animals need to adjust their decision-making strategies to the ecological challenges of their environment. Variation in ecological unpredictability and harshness thus seem to affect their decisions in the wild. In our study, we combine methods from human life history theory and previous comparative work with chimpanzees to investigate whether current variability in ecological factors such as reward unpredictability and harshness affect chimpanzees' decision-making strategies in two value-based scenarios. We presented chimpanzees with choices varying in the probability of obtaining food rewards (risk-choice task) and in their temporal availability (temporal discounting task). These scenarios were preceded by different sets of priming phases mimicking variability in resource unpredictability (predictable or unpredictable rewards) and harshness (abundant or scarce rewards). In addition, we implemented a social manipulation to explore whether variations in unpredictable gains and losses affected chimpanzees' performance in both tasks. We found that chimpanzees were only affected by the social manipulation in the risk-choice scenario. Specifically, after a period of constant food losses chimpanzees became less risk prone. We discuss how different types of negative experiences affect chimpanzees' decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

This study tested how the cross-race effect (CRE) varies across Asian, Latino, and White participants within a racially diverse context. Furthermore, it assessed how disrupting the racial categorization process of the CRE externally (racial ambiguity) and internally (cultural priming) moderates the CRE. Participants studied racially unambiguous and ambiguous Asian, Black, Latino and White faces. After studying half of the faces, participants were primed for their racial/ethnic identity or American identity. Before the prime, in racially unambiguous faces, only White participants exhibited the CRE for all other-race faces. Latino participants exhibited a limited CRE, and Asian participants did not show the CRE at all. For racially ambiguous faces, while Latino and White participants showed no CRE, Asian participants did for Latino and White faces. In addition, cultural priming moderated the CRE variously for the participant groups, suggesting that directing attention to different cultural identities may have ramifications for face processing.

We examined 3 different network models of representing semantic knowledge (5,018-word directed and undirected step distance networks, and an association-correlation network) to predict lexical priming effects. In Experiment 1, participants made semantic relatedness judgments for word pairs with varying path lengths. Response latencies for judgments followed a quadratic relationship with network path lengths, replicating and extending a recent pattern reported by Kenett, Levi, Anaki, and Faust (2017) for an 800-word association-correlation network in Hebrew. In Experiment 2, participants identified target words in a progressive demasking task, immediately following a briefly presented prime (120 ms). Response latencies to identify the target showed a linear trend for all network path lengths. Importantly, there were statistically significant differences between relatively distant words in the step distance networks, for example, path lengths 4 and beyond, suggesting that association networks can indeed capture distant functional semantic relationships. Additional comparisons with 2 distributional models (LSA and word2vec) suggested that distributional models also successfully predicted response latencies, although there appear to be fundamental differences in the types of semantic relationships captured by the different models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic ambiguity has been shown to slow comprehension, although it is unclear whether this ambiguity disadvantage is attributable to competition in semantic activation or difficulties in response selection. We tested the two accounts by examining semantic relatedness decisions to homonyms, or words with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g., football/electric fan). Our behavioral results showed that the ambiguity disadvantage arises only when the different meanings of words are of comparable frequency, and are thus activated in parallel. Critically, this effect was observed regardless of response-selection difficulties, both when the different meanings triggered inconsistent responses on related trials (e.g., fan–breeze) and consistent responses on unrelated trials (e.g., fan–snake). Our electrophysiological results confirmed that this effect arises during semantic activation of the ambiguous word, indexed by the N400, not during response selection. Overall, the findings show that ambiguity resolution involves semantic competition and delineate why and when this competition arises.

Considerable research effort has been devoted to investigating semantic priming effects, particularly, the locus of those effects. Semantically related primes might activate their target's lexical representation (through automatic spreading activation at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), or through generation of words expected to follow the prime at longer SOAs). Alternately, semantically related primes might aid responding after target identification (i.e., postlexically). In contrast, masked orthographic priming effects appear to be lexical and automatic. Lexical processing of targets is facilitated by orthographically similar nonword primes and often inhibited by orthographically similar word primes (Davis & Lupker, 2006). Using the lexical-decision task (LDT), we found additivity between the facilitative effects of visible semantic primes and the facilitative effects of masked orthographically similar nonword primes at long and short SOAs, consistent with a postlexical locus of the semantic priming effects. Also consistent with this conclusion, semantic primes affected the skew of the distribution (larger effects on longer latency trials), whereas masked orthographic primes did not. In a final experiment, visible primes that were semantically related to the masked orthographic word primes did not make those primes more effective lexical inhibitors of orthographically similar targets (independent of SOA). Taken together, our findings suggest that the impact of a semantic prime is not to increase the lexical activation of related concepts. Rather, they suggest that the locus of semantic priming effects in LDTs is postlexical, in that discovering the existence of a relationship between the prime and target biases participants to make a "word" response. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

In a masked priming word-naming task, a facilitation due to the initial-segmental sound overlap for 2-character kanji prime-target pairs was affected by certain orthographic properties (Yoshihara, Nakayama, Verdonschot, & Hino, 2017). That is, the facilitation that was due to the initial mora overlap occurred only when the mora was the whole pronunciation of their initial kanji characters (i.e., match pairs; e.g., /ka-se.ki/- /ka-rjo.ku/). When the shared initial mora was only a part of the kanji characters' readings, however, there was no facilitation (i.e., mismatch pairs; e.g., /ha.tu-a.N/- /ha.ku-bu.tu/). In the present study, we used a masked priming picture-naming task to investigate whether the previous results were relevant only when the orthography of targets is visually presented. In Experiment 1, the main findings of our word-naming task were fully replicated in a picture-naming task. In Experiments 2 and 3, the absence of facilitation for the mismatch pairs were confirmed with a new set of stimuli. On the other hand, a significant facilitation was observed for the match pairs that shared the 2 initial morae (in Experiment 4), which was again consistent with the results of our word-naming study. These results suggest that the orthographic properties constrain the phonological expression of masked priming for kanji words across 2 tasks that are likely to differ in how phonology is retrieved. Specifically, we propose that orthography of a word is activated online and constrains the phonological encoding processes in these tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Available evidence suggests enhanced spontaneous emotion regulation in healthy aging, but the effects of specific strategies and the associated age-related neural mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, younger and older participants rated the emotional content of negative and neutral images, after explicit instructions or implicit priming to engage emotional suppression as an emotion regulation strategy, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were recorded. Participants' memory for the images was also tested 1 week later. Behaviorally, younger and older adults were similarly successful in using explicit suppression to inhibit immediate emotional responses. However, this was associated with reduced long-term memory only for younger adults. fMRI data showed dissociable activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) coupled with similar activity in the amygdala in younger and older adults after the engagement of emotional suppression. Results also identified a lateral-to-medial shift in the functional connectivity of the PFC in aging, linked to the engagement of explicit suppression. Regarding memory, younger adults uniquely showed bilateral modulation of encoding-related activity in the hippocampus (HC), as well as a left-lateralized decrease of the HC-PFC functional connectivity after explicit emotional suppression. This is consistent with diminished involvement of typical mechanisms associated with emotional memory because of successful engagement of explicit suppression in younger adults. Taken together, these findings identified similar and differential effects of suppression on immediate emotional responses and long-term memory for emotional information, in younger and older adults, and provide insights into the neural mechanisms by which younger and older adults adaptively cope with emotional challenges. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The ability to switch efficiently between different tasks underpins cognitive flexibility and is impaired in various psychiatric disorders. Recent research has suggested that the control processes mediating switching can be subject to learning, because "switch readiness" can become associated with, and primed by, specific stimuli. In cued task switching, items that are frequently associated with the need to switch incur a smaller behavioral switch cost than do items associated with a low probability of switching, known as the item-specific switch probability (ISSP) effect (Chiu & Egner, 2017). However, it remains unknown whether ISSP associations modulate the efficiency of only cued switching or also impact people's voluntary choice to switch tasks. Here, we addressed this question by combining an ISSP manipulation with a protocol that mixed 75% standard cued task trials with 25% free choice trials, allowing us to measure the effect of ISSP on voluntary switch rate (VSR). We observed robust ISSP effects on cued trials, replicating previous findings. Crucially, we also found that the VSR was greater for items associated with a high than with a low switch likelihood. We thus demonstrate that associating specific stimuli with frequent switch requirements not only reduces switch costs but also enhances participants' tendency to switch voluntarily. Public Significance Statement A hallmark of human cognition is people's cognitive flexibility, reflected in the ability to efficiently switch between different tasks, which is impaired by many psychiatric disorders. A recent study demonstrated that the efficiency with which people switch tasks, or "switch readiness," can be improved through learning: People become better at switching tasks for stimuli that are frequently associated with the need to switch compared to stimuli that are rarely associated with switching. In the present study, we show that frequent-switch stimuli also increase people's tendency to switch tasks when they are allowed to choose which task to perform. This finding suggests that it might be possible to employ stimulus-specific cuing of switch readiness to enhance both the ability and the choice to behave more flexibly in clinical populations with deficits in cognitive flexibility.

Sexism has deep roots in human history, including most religious traditions. Many religious organizations and traditions, including Judeo-Christian beliefs, subtly approve of and espouse sexism. Previous research has detailed how religiosity and sexism, particularly benevolent sexism, are positively

The Japanese kana syllabary has 2 allographic forms, hiragana and katakana. As with other allographic variants like the uppercase and lowercase letters of the Roman alphabet, they show robust form-independent priming effects in the allograph match task (e.g., Kinoshita, Schubert, & Verdonschot, 2019), suggesting that they share abstract character-level representations. In direct contradiction, Perea, Nakayama, and Lupker (2017) argued that hiragana and katakana do not share character-level representations, based on their finding of reduced priming with identity prime containing a mix of hiragana and katakana (the mixed-kana prime) relative to the all-katakana identity prime in a lexical-decision task with loanword targets written in katakana. Here we sought to reconcile these seemingly contradictory claims, using mixed-kana, hiragana, and katakana primes in lexical decision. The mixed-kana prime and hiragana prime produced priming effects that are indistinguishable, and both were reduced in size relative to the priming effect produced by the katakana identity prime. Furthermore, this pattern was unchanged when the target was presented in hiragana. The findings are interpreted in terms of the assumption that the katakana format is specified in the orthographic representation of loanwords in Japanese readers. Implications of the account for the universality across writing systems is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

There is considerable confusion in the visual attention literature as to whether shifts of attention are biased against or in favor of previously attended regions. Studies requiring target localization have shown a performance cost when the target location randomly repeats instead of changes, whereas studies requiring arbitrary keypress responses to target identities have shown a benefit. These studies differ in the amount of attention required to the target and in the stimulus-response translation rules. To evaluate the contribution of each of these factors in accounting for the mixed results, we had participants indicate whether color singletons appeared in the left versus right visual field, or in the upper versus lower visual field, by making spatially compatible keypress responses (a between-experiment manipulation of the stimulus-response translation rules). Within each experiment, we manipulated whether a subtle discrimination of shape was necessary before localizing the target (a manipulation of focal attention). The findings revealed that the costs and benefits for repeating the target location are determined by stimulus-response translation rules, with no effect of or on attention independent of these rules. The results are accounted for by the theory of event coding, and further challenge the notion that location repetition effects reliably reflect attentional bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

In past decades, researchers have conducted a myriad of masked priming lexical decision experiments aimed at unveiling the early processes underlying lexical access. A relatively overlooked question is whether a masked unrelated wordlike/unwordlike prime influences the processing of the target stimuli. If participants apply to the primes the same instructions as to the targets, one would predict a response congruency effect (e.g., book-TRUE faster than fiok-TRUE). Critically, the Bayesian Reader model predicts that there should be no effects of response congruency in masked priming lexical decision, whereas interactive-activation models offer more flexible predictions. We conducted 3 masked priming lexical decision experiments with 4 unrelated priming conditions differing in lexical status and wordlikeness (high-frequency word, low-frequency word, orthographically legal pseudoword, consonant string). Experiment 1 used wordlike nonwords as foils, Experiment 2 used illegal nonwords as foils, and Experiment 3 used orthographically legal hermit nonwords as foils. When the foils were orthographically legal (Experiments 1 and 3; i.e., a standard lexical decision scenario), lexical decision responses were not affected by the lexical status or wordlikeness of the unrelated primes, as predicted by the Bayesian Reader model and the selective inhibition hypothesis in interactive-activation models. When the foils were illegal (Experiment 2), consonant-string primes produced the slowest responses for word targets and the fastest responses for nonword targets. The Bayesian Reader model can capture this pattern, assuming that participants in Experiment 2 were making an orthographic legality decision (i.e., anything legal must be a word) rather than a lexical decision. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Limited research has investigated appearance-related attentional biases in men. This study examined the effects of priming on attentional biases in men and whether the biases were associated with body image. The dot-probe task (DPT), a commonly used reaction time-based measure, was adapted to include images between each trial of the task to test the effects of these images on attentional biases for appearancerelated word stimuli. Men (N = 60) completed body image questionnaires online and attended a laboratory session, completing either (a) an appearance-cued DPT, containing images representing the muscular ideal; (b) a neutral-cued DPT, containing images of forests; or (c) a DPT with time delay in place of an image. Attentional biases for positive- and negative-appearance words did not differ for men who completed the three DPT versions. However, for men who completed the appearance-cued DPT, attentional biases for positive-appearance words correlated with a range of state experiences, including greater levels of muscularity and appearance dissatisfaction and poorer confidence and mood. The results suggest that men may experience poorer body image outcomes by automatically attending to the positive attributes of media depictions of the muscular ideal.

In a simplified repetition blindness (RB) paradigm, university students named target words (C2) that were presented for 72 ms and followed by a pattern mask. A prime word (C1) that was identical or unrelated to the target was read silently at the beginning of each trial, and there was an intervening distractor item displayed for 120 ms between prime and target. When the distractor was a word, there was a large repetition cost for target accuracy at both prime durations (Experiments 1A and 1B). The cost with word distractors was not abolished when instructions about repeats were given (Experiments 2A and 2B). When the distractor was selected from a set of random-letter strings, there was a repetition benefit in target accuracy for a 120-ms prime and no effect for a 480-ms prime (Experiments 3A and 3B). The cost of distractor lexicality implicates competitive effects in event registration and ordering. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

A central issue in the study of speech production is whether phonological encoding occurs sequentially or in parallel. Some of the strongest evidence for sequential phonological encoding comes from the number of segments primed effect-response latencies decrease when increasing the number of primed segments from 0 to 1 to 2 (e.g., Meyer, 1991). Although it is often assumed that all participants adopt the same response criterion in the naming task, standard instructions can lead to the strategic adoption of different response criteria (such as an initial segment-based criterion or a syllable-based criterion). Furthermore, the number of segments primed effect might be driven by the manner of the initial segment such as the acoustic characteristics of plosives. In this study, participants named monosyllabic words varying in initial segment plosivity in a 0, 1, or 2 segments primed naming task and were instructed in ways to induce either a segment or syllable criterion. Data were analyzed by acoustic latency, articulatory latency, and initial segment duration, as distinguishing between a segment and syllable criterion and sequential and parallel encoding requires more than just a single point in the time-course of articulation. Shorter acoustic latencies when priming 2 segments over 1 were contingent on the manner of the initial segment and the adoption of a segment criterion, clarifying the nature of the number of segments primed effect. Moreover, the similar acoustic latencies found across priming conditions when a syllable criterion was adopted support parallel phonological encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Because people integrate more information into their representations when they construe a situation abstractly (i.e., on a high level) than when they construe a situation concretely (i.e., on a low level), it was hypothesized that level of construal would also affect cross-sensory influences of visual information on taste perception. In three experiments, participants were first primed with a high-level versus low-level construal mindset using an exemplar-category task. Next, participants sampled beverages in cups that differed in color and rated several qualities of the beverage. It was expected that color would have an influence on beverage perception, especially when participants were primed with a high construal level. In line with this hypothesis, it was found that participants who generated high-level categories in the priming task rated sparkling water as more refreshing in a blue than in a yellow cup (Experiment 1), an energy drink as more sour in a yellow than in a blue cup (Experiment 2), and coffee as hotter in a red than in a blue cup (Experiment 3). The findings provide the first evidence that a high level of construal can increase cross-sensory assimilation. Possible processes are discussed, such as the integration of objects and the integration of sensory information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Substantial research across Indo-European languages suggests that readers display a degree of uncertainty in letter position coding. For example, readers perceive transposed-letter stimuli, such as jugde, as similar to their base words (e.g., judge). However, tolerance to disruptions of letter order is not apparent in all languages, suggesting that critical aspects of the writing system may shape the nature of position coding. We investigated readers' tolerance to these disruptions in Korean, a writing system characterized by a high degree of orthographic confusability. Results of three Korean masked priming experiments revealed robust identity priming effects, but no indication of priming due to shared letters or syllables in different positions. Two further masked priming experiments revealed where the Korean findings deviate from English. These results support the claim that the nature of the writing system influences the precision of orthographic representations used in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent work has challenged the previously widely accepted belief that affective processing does not require awareness and can be carried out with more limited resources than semantic processing. This debate has focused exclusively on visual perception, even though evidence from both human and animal studies suggests that existence for nonconscious affective processing would be physiologically more feasible in the auditory system. Here we contrast affective and semantic processing of nonverbal emotional vocalizations under different levels of awareness in three experiments, using explicit (two-alternative forced choice masked affective and semantic categorization tasks, Experiments 1 and 2) and implicit (masked affective and semantic priming, Experiment 3) measures. Identical stimuli and design were used in the semantic and affective tasks. Awareness was manipulated by altering stimulus-mask signal-to-noise ratio during continuous auditory masking. Stimulus awareness was measured on each trial using a four-point perceptual awareness scale. In explicit tasks, neither affective nor semantic categorization could be performed in the complete absence of awareness, while both tasks could be performed above chance level when stimuli were consciously perceived. Semantic categorization was faster than affective evaluation. When the stimuli were partially perceived, semantic categorization accuracy exceeded affective evaluation accuracy. In implicit tasks neither affective nor semantic priming occurred in the complete absence of awareness, whereas both affective and semantic priming emerged when participants were aware of the primes. We conclude that auditory semantic processing is faster than affective processing, and that both affective and semantic auditory processing are dependent on awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

It is well-established that allographs like the uppercase and lowercase forms of the Roman alphabet (e.g., a and A) map onto the same "abstract letter identity," orthographic representations that are independent of the visual form. Consistent with this, in the allograph match task ("Are 'a' and 'A' the same letter?"), priming by a masked letter prime is equally robust for visually dissimilar prime-target pairs (e.g., d and D) and similar pairs (e.g., c and C). However, in principle this pattern of priming is also consistent with the possibility that allograph priming is purely phonological, based on the letter name. Because different allographic forms of the same letter, by definition, share a letter name, it is impossible to rule out this possibility a priori. In the present study, we investigated the influence of shared letter names by taking advantage of the fact that Japanese is written in two distinct writing systems, syllabic kana-that has two parallel forms, hiragana and katakana-and logographic kanji. Using the allograph match task, we tested whether a kanji prime with the same pronunciation as the target kana (e.g., - い, both pronounced /i/) produces the same amount of priming as a kana prime in the opposite kana form (e.g., イ- い). We found that the kana primes produced substantially greater priming than the phonologically identical kanji prime, which we take as evidence that allograph priming is based on abstract kana identity, not purely phonology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study investigated the impact of language proficiency and executive control (EC) ability on cross-language semantic activation using an English semantic priming lexical-decision task. Primes were either English-French homographs (i.e., words that share spelling but not meaning, e.g., pain means "bread" in French; related trial) or matched control words (e.g., pale; unrelated trial). Type of Priming was either translation (e.g., pain-BREAD) or cross-language associative (e.g., pain-BUTTER). A living/nonliving judgment task and a colour Stroop task measured individual differences in language proficiency and EC, respectively. Reaction time (RT) data from 58 bilingual young adults were analysed using linear mixed-effects modelling. Experimental variables (Type of Priming, relatedness), and individual-differences variables (English language proficiency, EC ability) served as fixed variables. Unlike previous studies on cross-language semantic activation, the current study included EC ability as an individual difference variable and found that it interacted with language proficiency to impact associative priming performance. Linear mixed-effects models for associative priming revealed that participants with slow English access exhibited increased positive priming from homographs, whereas individuals with fast lexical access experienced negative priming. Furthermore, these effects were exaggerated for individuals with poor EC. No effects of individual difference variables were observed on translation priming. These results suggest that theories of bilingual word recognition need to incorporate individual difference variables beyond language proficiency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Research has suggested that interpersonal touch promotes social processing and other-concern, and that women may respond to it more sensitively than men. In this study, we asked whether this phenomenon would extend to third-party observers who experience touch vicariously. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants (N = 64, 32 men and 32 women) viewed prime and target images with the intention of remembering them. Primes comprised line drawings of dyadic interactions with and without touch. Targets comprised two faces shown side-by-side, with one being neutral and the other being happy or sad. Analysis of prime fixations revealed that faces in touch interactions attracted longer gazing than faces in no-touch interactions. In addition, touch enhanced gazing at the area of touch in women but not men. Analysis of target fixations revealed that touch priming increased looking at both faces immediately after target onset, and subsequently, at the emotional face in the pair. Sex differences in target processing were nonsignificant. Together, the present results imply that vicarious touch biases visual attention to faces and promotes emotion sensitivity. In addition, they suggest that, compared with men, women are more aware of tactile exchanges in their environment. As such, vicarious touch appears to share important qualities with actual physical touch. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

We investigated the mechanisms underlying sandwich priming, a procedure in which a brief preprime target presentation precedes the conventional mask-prime-target sequence, used to study orthographic similarity. Lupker and Davis (2009) showed the sandwich paradigm enhances orthographic priming effects: With primes moderately related to targets, sandwich priming produced significant facilitation, but conventional priming did not. They argued that unlike conventional priming, sandwich priming is not susceptible to an uncontrolled counteractive inhibitory process, lexical competition, that cancels out moderate facilitation effects. They suggest lexical competition is eliminated by preactivating the target's representation, privileging the target over similar lexical units (competitors). As such, it better measures orthographic relatedness between primes and targets, a key purpose of many priming studies. We tested whether elimination of lexical competition could indeed account for the observed orthographic priming boost with sandwich priming. In three lexical decision experiments and accompanying simulations with a competitive network model, we compared priming effects in three preprime procedures: no preprime (conventional), identity (target) preprime (sandwich), and competitor preprime (included to exacerbate lexical competition). The related prime conditions consisted of replaced-letters, shared neighbor (one-letter-different from both competitor preprime and target), and transposed-all-letter nonword primes. Contrary to the model's predictions, the competitor preprime did not attenuate (Experiment 1) or even reverse the priming effect (Experiment 2). Moreover, the competitor enabled facilitatory priming that was absent with no preprime (Experiment 3). These data suggested that the sandwich orthographic boost could not be attributed to reduced lexical competition but rather to prelexical processes in word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Masked priming tasks have been used widely to study early orthographic processes—the coding of letter position and letter identity. Recently, using masked priming in the same–different task Lupker, Nakayama, and Perea (2015a) reported finding a phonological priming effect with primes presented in Japanese Katakana, and English target words presented in the Roman alphabet, and based on this finding, suggested that previously reported effects in the same–different task in the literature could be based on phonology rather than orthography. In this article, the authors explain why the design of Lupker et al.’s experiment does not address this question; they then report 2 new experiments that do. The results indicate that the priming produced by orthographically similar primes in the same–different task for letter strings presented in the Roman alphabet is almost exclusively orthographic in origin, and phonology makes little contribution. The authors offer an explanation for why phonological priming was observed when the prime and target are presented in different scripts but not when they are presented in the same script., Public Significance Statement The masked priming same–different task, in which people are asked to decide whether the target (e.g., CULT) preceded by a briefly presented prime (cult) is the same or different from the referent (cult) is used widely to study early orthographic processes with letter and word stimuli. A recent study, using primes written in a different writing system from the referent and target found phonological priming effects and, based on this result, suggested that the masked priming effects from this task could be phonological, rather than orthographic. The article explains why that finding does not address the issue, and provides empirical evidence against the suggested possibility. Understanding the processes underlying experimental tasks is important for meaningful interpretation of data.

We investigated whether witnessing social exclusion influenced memory recall in preschool children. A sample of 81 children (Mage = 5 years, 4 months) first watched priming videos either depicting social exclusion or not. Subsequently, they participated in two memory tasks, one testing recall of numbers and the other testing recall of previously heard story events. These consisted of social (e.g., "brother") and nonsocial (e.g., "circus") items. In addition, a language-screening test was conducted to ensure that in both conditions (i.e., social exclusion and control), children's language levels were similar. In both conditions, children scored comparably on number recall and overall recall of story events. However, only children who observed social exclusion remembered more social than nonsocial items. The findings suggest that vicarious social exclusion triggers selective retention of social information in preschool age, in accord with findings of older children and adults who directly experienced social exclusion. Social exclusion affects the need to belong in young children, not only indicated by means of increased attempts to affiliate, but also by an increased memory for social events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous research has suggested that people's attachment styles influence memory processes. Most of this work has focused on the encoding and retrieval of information about events that actually took place. The purpose of the present research was to determine (a) whether attachment styles also predict memories for events that never occurred (false memories); (b) whether experimentally induced attachment anxiety leads to the generation of false memories for interpersonal experiences; and (c) whether these errors arise during encoding, maintenance, or retrieval processes. Our results indicated that attachment anxiety is associated with people's propensities to experience false alarms on recognition tasks for relational stimuli. Moreover, experimentally altering participants' state levels of attachment anxiety led to more numerous false alarms, as compared with an unprimed control group. These findings are consistent with the idea that attachment-related anxiety might selectively bias and desensitize the encoding of interpersonal events, ultimately leading people to remember events that did not occur. However, experimentally priming anxiety did not lead to more false alarms relative to groups primed with security, raising the possibility that the anxiety-false memory association could be because of making relational issues salient rather than increasing attachment anxiety per se. (PsycINFO Database Record

Physiological synchronization (PS) is a phenomenon of simultaneous activity between two persons' physiological signals. It has been associated with empathy, shared affectivity, and efficacious therapeutic relationships. The aim of the present study was to explore the possible connections between PS and the attachment system, seeking preliminary evidence of this link by means of an experimental manipulation of the sense of attachment security in psychotherapists according to a protocol by Mikulincer and Shaver (2001), which has been proven to elicit empathetic behavior. We compared the synchronization of skin-conductance signals in brief psychological interviews between 18 psychodynamic therapists and 18 healthy volunteers. A sense of attachment-security priming was administered to half of the therapists, whereas the other half received a positive-affect control prime. Lag analysis was performed to investigate the "leading" or "following" attitudes of the participants in the two conditions. Mixed-model regressions and evidence-ratio model comparisons were used to investigate the effects of the manipulation on PS. Therapist attachment anxiety and avoidance traits were considered covariates. The attachment-security prime showed a significant effect on PS lag dynamics, but not on overall PS amount. Lag analysis showed that the therapists in the attachment-security condition were significantly more prone to assume a leading attitude in the physiological coupling than the therapists in the control condition. Therapist attachment anxiety and avoidance had no apparent effect. Our result paves the way for further exploration of the clinical relationship from a physiological standpoint. (PsycINFO Database Record

Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994) found that pop-out search performance is more efficient when a singleton target feature repeats rather than switches from 1 trial to the next-an effect known as priming of pop-out (PoP). They also reported findings indicating that the PoP effect is strongly automatic, as it was unaffected by knowledge of the upcoming target color. In the present study, we examined the impact of visual imagery on the PoP effect. Participants were instructed to imagine a target color that was opposite that of the preceding trial (e.g., if the prior target was red, then imagine green). Under these conditions, responses were faster for targets that matched the imagined color than for targets that matched the previous target color, reversing the typical PoP effect. There was no such reversal of the PoP effect for participants asked to verbalize rather than imagine an upcoming target color. In Experiment 3, we explored whether the PoP effect was indeed eliminated in the prior experiments, or instead obscured by the opposing visual imagery effect. Two conditions were compared, 1 in which a PoP effect could oppose the visual imagery effect, and another in which no such effect was possible, allowing inferences about whether a PoP effect was present. The results indicated that the PoP effect was present, but obscured by the larger visual imagery strategy effect that pushed performance in the opposite direction. Overall, the results suggest that the PoP effect is sensitive to top-down strategies that involve visual representations. (PsycINFO Database Record

These meta-analyses of 60+ years of social comparison research focused on 2 issues: the choice of a comparison target (selection) and the effects of comparisons on self-evaluations, affect, and so forth (reaction). Selection studies offering 2 options (up or down) showed a strong preference (and no evidence of publication bias) for upward choices when there was no threat; there was no evidence for downward comparison as a dominant choice even when threatened. Selections became less differentiable when a lateral choice was also provided. For reaction studies, contrast was, by far, the dominant response to social comparison, with ability estimates most strongly affected. Moderator analyses, tests and adjustments for publication bias showed that contrast is stronger when the comparison involves varying participants' standing for ability (effect estimates, -0.75 to -0.65) and affect (-0.83 to -0.65). Novel personal attributes were subject to strong contrast for ability (-0.5 to -0.6) and affect (-0.6 to -0.7). Dissimilarity priming was associated with contrast (-0.44 to -0.27; no publication bias), consistent with Mussweiler (2003). Similarity priming provided modest support for Collins (1996) and Mussweiler (2003), with very weak assimilation effects, depending on the publication bias estimator. Studies including control groups indicated effects in response to upward and downward targets were comparable in size and contrastive. Limitations of the literature (e.g., small number of studies including no-comparison control conditions), unresolved issues, and why people choose to compare upward when the most likely result is self-deflating contrast are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record