Search

We investigated whether inner language enhances memory for events in a naturalistic, non-verbal task where participants constructed simple models from memory after watching an instructional video. Across three experiments, we used linguistic suppression to manipulate access to language and tested its effect on overall memory performance. Results showed that access to inner language consistently affected event memory: when inner language was disrupted at encoding, participants were poorer at recalling the models and remembered fewer events. Critically, the effect of linguistic suppression on memory performance was greater than a control secondary task that did not affect access to language (i.e., poorer performance was not solely due to dual-task effects). These findings support the proposal that inner language enhances event memory via a mechanism of linguistic bootstrapping, which in turn extends theories of event memory and adds to a growing body of evidence that inner language is a highly valuable cognitive tool.

Combining words in new ways is a hallmark of linguistic generativity. Previous work has shown that people's understanding of novel noun-noun combinations is influenced by the linguistic distributional information associated with a compound's constituents - words closer in semantic space are more likely to be judged as sensible/interpretable, and processed more quickly, than constituents that are further apart in semantic space. We extend this work by investigating whether two levels of linguistic distributional knowledge (first-order local co-occurrences, second-order contextual similarity), and the sensorimotor similarity of the constituents, impact people's processing effort. In two experimental studies, we found that linguistic distributional information facilitated processing of novel combinations for both shallow sensibility judgements, and deeper interpretation generation. Effects were stronger for interpretation generation, and for distributional measures, but these effects were mediated by the concrete/abstract nature of a compound's head noun. The findings support embodied theories that propose a strong role for linguistic distributional information.

Semantic richness theory predicts that words with richer, more distinctive semantic representations should facilitate performance in a word recognition memory task. We investigated the contribution of multiple aspects of sensorimotor experience--those relating to the body, communication, food, and objects--to word recognition memory, by analyzing megastudy data in a series of hierarchical linear regressions. We found that different forms of sensorimotor experience produced different effects on memory. While stronger grounding in object- and food-related experience facilitated word memory performance as expected for semantic richness, experience relating to communication did not. Critically, sensorimotor experience relating to the body impaired rather than facilitated recognition memory by inflating false alarms, which was not consistent with the idea that semantically richer representations are more memorable. Additionally, we found that pure imageability (i.e., consciously generating mental imagery, distinct from sensorimotor experience) contributes to semantic richness effects on word memory but with much smaller effect sizes than previously reported, once sensorimotor grounding was taken into account. These results suggest that word recognition memory is often but not consistently facilitated by rich semantic representations and that it is essential to separately consider distinct forms of sensorimotor experience rather than assuming more information is always better. The findings have implications for the use of semantic variables in memory research.

Background: Existing evidence suggests that clinician and organization engagement in research can improve healthcare processes of care and outcomes. However, current evidence has considered the relationship across all healthcare professions collectively. With the increase in allied health clinical academic and research activity, it is imperative for healthcare organizations, leaders and managers to understand engagement in research within these specific clinical fields. This systematic review aims to identify the effect of engagement in research by allied health professionals (AHPs) and organizations on healthcare performance. Methods: This systematic review has a two-stage search strategy. The first stage will be to screen a previous systematic review examining the effectiveness of engagement in research in health and social care to identify relevant papers published pre-2012. The search strategy used in the previous review will then be rerun, but with a specific focus on allied health. This multi-database search will identify publications from 2012 to date. Only studies that assessed the effectiveness of allied health engagement in research will be included. All stages of the review will be conducted by two reviewers independently, plus documented discussions with the wider research team when discrepancies occur. This systematic review protocol follows the EQUATOR reporting guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses for Protocols (PRISMA-P). Discussion: The findings of this review will make a significant contribution to the evidence base around the effect of allied health engagement in research on healthcare performance. It will provide insights for clinicians and managers looking to understand the consequences of developing AHP research capability and capacity. The findings of this review will also aim to make recommendations for future evaluation approaches for engagement in research interventions.

BackgroundHepatic artery infusion (HAI) chemotherapy is associated with overall survival (OS) in patients with resected colon cancer liver metastases (CLM). The prognostic impact of primary tumor location in CLM following hepatic resection in patients receiving regional HAI is unknown. This study seeks to investigate the prognostic impact of HAI in relation to laterality in this patient population.MethodsConsecutive patients with resected CLM, with known primary tumor site treated with and without HAI, were reviewed from a prospective institutional database. Correlations between HAI, laterality, other clinicopathological factors, and survival were analyzed, and Cox proportional hazard regression was used to determine whether laterality was an independent prognostic factor.ResultsFrom 1993 to 2012, 487 patients [182 with right colon cancer (RCC), 305 with left colon cancer (LCC)] were evaluated with a median follow-up of 6.5 years. Fifty-seven percent (n = 275) received adjuvant HAI. Patients with RCC had inferior 5-year OS compared with LCC (56% vs. 67%, P = 0.01). HAI was associated with improved 5-year OS in both RCC (68% vs. 45%; P

Category production tasks (aka semantic fluency) typically concentrate on concrete categories, meaning little is known about abstract categories and potential differences in their structure. Using a category production task for 67 concrete (e.g., animals, tools) and 50 abstract (e.g., science, emotion) categories, we investigated differences in produced member concepts. Abstract categories were smaller than concrete categories, their member concepts were generated more slowly, and had longer and more phonologically-distinct names. Abstract category members were grounded in sensorimotor experience (i.e., with high sensorimotor strength), though overall to a lesser extent than concrete category members. Several ostensibly abstract categories appeared amongst the highest-rated in sensorimotor strength (e.g., sport) while some ostensibly concrete categories were amongst the lowest-rated (e.g., chemical element). The data highlight linguistic and semantic differences in concrete and abstract category structure, but also that they share a common sensorimotor grounding.

We investigated the effect of semantic information on word memory, using imageability and sensorimotor strength as predictors, with data from a mega-study of word recognition memory (Cortese et al., 2010; 2015), as well as from an online memory task. Memory performance was analysed in hierarchical linear regressions. Both sensorimotor strength and imageability had an effect on word memory performance, but not as strong as reported in previous literature. However, the effects were smaller when the memory task was unexpected, suggesting that the semantic effects are dependent on memory strategies (or context). Most importantly, different types of sensorimotor strength had a variable effect on memory, which was not in line with the prediction of the semantic richness effect, and highlighted the importance of a multi-dimensional approach to measuring and testing semantic experience, and its effect on cognitive processing. The findings have implications for the use of semantic variables in memory research.

Experimental design and computational modelling across the cognitive sciences often rely on measures of semantic similarity between words/concepts. Traditional measures of semantic similarity typically rely on corpus-derived linguistic distributional similarity (e.g. LSA) or distance in taxonomic databases (e.g. WordNet), which are theoretically problematic in their lack of grounding in sensorimotor experience. We present a new measure of sensorimotor similarity between concepts, based on multidimensional comparisons of their experiential strength across 11 perceptual and action-effector dimensions in the Lancaster Sensorimotor norms. We demonstrate that, in modelling human similarity and relatedness judgements, sensorimotor similarity has comparable explanatory power to LSA and WordNet distance, explains variance in human judgements which is missed by other measures, and does so with the advantages of remaining both fully grounded and computationally efficient. We further introduce a web-based tool for easily calculating and visualising sensorimotor similarity between words, featuring coverage of nearly 800 million word pairs.

When given unrestricted time to process an image, people are faster and more accurate at making categorical decisions about a depicted object (e.g., Labrador) if it is close in sensorimotor and linguistic distributional experience to its target category concept (e.g., dog). In this preregistered study, we examined whether sensorimotor and linguistic distributional information affect object categorisation differently as a function of time available for perceptual processing. Using an ultrarapid categorisation paradigm with backwards masking, we systematically varied onset timing (SOA) of a post-stimulus mask (17-133ms) following a briefly displayed (17ms) object. Preliminary results suggest that linguistic distributional distance between concept and category (e.g., Labrador → dog), but not sensorimotor distance, affects categorisation accuracy and RT even in rapid categorisation, and that these effects do not vary systematically by SOA. These findings support the role of a linguistic shortcut (i.e., using linguistic distributional instead of sensorimotor information) in rapid object categorisation.

The linguistic-simulation approach to cognition predicts thatlanguage can enable more efficient conceptual processing thansensorimotor-affective simulations of concepts. We proposed thatthis has implications for working memory, whereby use oflinguistic labels enables more efficient representation of conceptsin a limited-capacity store than representation via fullsensorimotor simulation. In two pre-registered experiments, weasked participants to remember sequences of real-world objects,and used articulatory suppression to selectively block access tolinguistic information, which we predicted would impair accuracyand latency of performance in an object memory recognition task.We found that blocking access to language at encoding impairedmemory performance, but blocking access at retrievalunexpectedly facilitated speed of responding. These resultssuggest that working memory for object concepts normally relieson language but people can flexibly adapt their memory strategieswhen language is unavailable. Moreover, our data suggest that asequence of up to 10 object concepts can be held in workingmemory when relying on sensorimotor information alone, but thiscapacity increases when linguistic labels are available.

We investigated the contribution of sensorimotor and linguistic distributional information in a semantic category produc-tion task, hypothesizing that the task would rely on both but particularly on linguistic distributional information, whichmay provide a shortcut for conceptual processing. In a pre-registered study, we asked participants to name members ofsemantic categories and tested whether responses were predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor proximity (based onan 11-dimension representation of sensorimotor experience) and linguistic proximity (based on word co-occurrence de-rived from a large subtitle corpus). Both proximity measures predicted the order and frequency of responses and, critically,linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor proximity. Our findings support linguistic-sensorimotoraccounts of the conceptual system and suggest that category production is based on both the similarity of sensorimotor ex-perience between the category and member concepts, and on the linguistic distributional relationship between the categoryand member labels.

Many theories of semantic memory assume that categories spontaneously emerge from commonalities in the way we per-ceive and interact with the world around us. However, efforts to test this assumption computationally have been hamperedby use of abstracted features without clear sensorimotor grounding and over-reliance on small samples of concepts from alimited number of categories. Taking a radically different approach, we examined whether categorical structure emergesspontaneously from the latent structure of sensorimotor experience by creating a fully-grounded multidimensional senso-rimotor space at the scale of a full-size human conceptual system (i.e., 11 sensorimotor dimensions x 40,000 concepts).We found evidence for (a) a high-level separation of abstract and concrete categories (which was not enhanced by theinclusion of affective information); (b) a hierarchical structure of concrete concepts that separated categories commonlyimpaired in double dissociations, such as fruit/vegetables, animals, tools, and musical instruments; and (c) a flatter hi-erarchy of abstract concepts that separated categories such as negative emotions, units of time, social relationships, andpolitical systems. These findings demonstrate that grounded sensorimotor information is fundamental to the representationof all conceptual knowledge.

The basic-level advantage is one of the best-known effects in human categorisation. Traditional accounts argue that basic-level categories present a maximally informative or entry-level into a taxonomic organisation of concepts in semanticmemory. However, these explanations are not fully compatible with most recent views on the structure of the concep-tual system, which emphasise the role of sensorimotor (i.e., perception-action experience of the world) and linguisticinformation (i.e., statistical distribution of words in language) in conceptual processing. In a pre-registered wordpicturecategorisation study, we hypothesised that our novel measures of sensorimotor and linguistic distance would contribute tocategorical decision making, and would outperform traditional taxonomic levels (i.e., subordinate, basic, superordinate)in predicting the basic-level advantage. Results showed that, overall, our measures predicted the basic-level advantage atleast as well as taxonomic level. Sensorimotor information best explained processing speed, whereas taxonomic level bestexplained participants choices.

Sensorimotor information plays a fundamental role incognition. However, datasets of ratings of sensorimotorexperience have generally been restricted to several hundredwords, leading to limited linguistic coverage and reducedstatistical power for more complex analyses. Here, we presentmodality-specific and effector-specific norms for 39,954concepts across six sensory modalities (touch, hearing, smell,taste, vision, and interoception) and five action effectors(mouth/throat, hand/arm, foot/leg, head excluding mouth, andtorso), which were gathered from 4,557 participants whocompleted a total of 32,456 surveys using Amazon'sMechanical Turk platform. The dataset therefore representsone of the largest set of semantic norms currently available.We describe the data collection procedures, provide summarydescriptives of the data set, demonstrate the utility of thenorms in predicting lexical decision times and accuracy, aswell as offering new insights and outlining avenues for futureresearch. Our findings will be of interest to researchers inembodied cognition, cognitive semantics, sensorimotorprocessing, and the psychology of language generally. Thescale of this dataset will also facilitate computationalmodelling and big data approaches to the analysis of languageand conceptual representations.

The surrounding environment has a profound impact on human behaviour. Historically, studies have shown that highertemperatures are associated with increases in antisocial behaviours (aggression, violence). More recently, studies havelinked higher temperature experiences to increases in prosocial behaviours (altruism, co-operation). Such contrastingpatterns leave the status of temperature-behaviour links unclear. Here we conduct a series of meta-analyses of laboratory-based empirical studies that measure either prosocial (monetary reward, gift giving, helping) or antisocial (retaliation,horn honking, sabotage) outcomes, with temperature as an independent variable. Overall, we found that there was noreliable effect of temperature on the behavioural outcomes measured. In follow-up analyses, there was no reliable effectof temperature on prosocial or antisocial outcomes when analysed separately. We consider why the evidence to supporttemperature-behaviour links from laboratory-based studies is weak, assess potential moderators, and examine how futurestudies can attempt to reconcile seemingly contradictory patterns in the literature.

Conceptual representations in language processing employboth linguistic distributional and embodied information. Here,we aim to demonstrate the roles of these two components inmetaphor processing. The linguistic component is captured bylinguistic distributional frequency (LDF), that is, how oftenthe constituent words appear together in context. Theembodied component, on the other hand, refers to how easy itis to generate an embodied simulation, operationalised by aprevious norming study. In the current study, we looked at theinterplay of these components in metaphor processing, andinvestigated their roles at different depths of processing intwo experiments. Thus, we required participants to engage inshallow processing (Experiment 1: Sensibility Judgement), ordeep processing (Experiment 2: Interpretation Generation).Results showed that the increase of both variables made itmore likely to accept a metaphor. However, whereas ease ofsimulation (EoS) contributed to the speed of processing atboth levels of depth, LDF only affected the speed in shallowprocessing. Specifically, LDF acted as a heuristic, both tospeed up responses to accept metaphors as sensible when thefrequency is high, and to flag up potentially unsuccessfulprocessing when it is low. Overall, these results support viewsof language processing that emphasise the importance of bothlinguistic and embodied components according to task goals.

Concepts are the basis of the human cognitive system, andthe question of what constitutes the content of these mentalrepresentations has long occupied the cognitive sciences.Work in psychology, linguistics and cognitive neurosciencehas converged on the idea that we develop our conceptualrepresentations through our perception of and interactionwith our environment. To date, such research has typicallyrestricted consideration to the perceptual modalities ofvision, touch, sound, taste, and smell. However, there isanother major modality of perceptual information that isdistinct from these traditional five senses; that is,interoception, or sensations within the body. In this paper,we explore the role of interoception in the perceptualgrounding of concepts.Recently, modality-specific measures of the strength ofperceptual experience (Lynott & Connell 2009, 2013) haveproven themselves important predictors of human behaviourin a range of conceptual tasks including word recognitionand reading (Connell & Lynott, 2010, 2012, 2014a, 2014b,2015, 2016). In a megastudy of over 32,000 words fromacross the abstract-concrete spectrum, we asked people toprovide modality-specific ratings of perceptual strength forsix modalities: the usual five (auditory, haptic, gustatory,olfactory, visual) plus the new category of interoceptivestrength. We found that interoceptive information dominatesthe perceptual profile of a sizeable number of concepts (9%;e.g., hangover, eternal, remorse), less than the proportion ofconcepts dominated by vision (74%; e.g., book) or sound(12%; e.g., melody), but more than are dominated by touch(3%; e.g., silky), gustation (2%; e.g., candy), or olfaction(

The implicit association test (IAT) measures bias towards often controversial topics (race/religion), while newspaperstypically take strong positive/negative stances on such issues. In a pre-registered study, we developed and administered an im-migration IAT to readers of the Daily Mail (typically anti-immigration) and Guardian (typically pro-immigration) newspapers.IAT Materials were constructed based on co-occurrence frequencies from each newspapers’ website for immigration-relatedterms (migrant) and positive/negative attributes (skilled/unskilled). Target stimuli showed stronger negative associations withimmigration concepts in the Daily Mail corpus compared to the Guardian corpus, and stronger positive associations in theGuardian corpus compared to the Daily Mail. Consistent with these linguistic distributional differences, Daily Mail readersexhibited a larger IAT bias, revealing stronger negative associations to immigration concepts compared to Guardian readers.This difference in overall bias was not explained by other variables, and raises the possibility that exposure to biased languagecontributes to biased implicit attitudes.