The processing of time activates a spatial left-to-right mental timeline, where past events are "located" to the left and future events to the right. If past and future words activate this mental timeline, then the processing of such words should interfere with hand movements that go in the opposite direction. To test this hypothesis, we…

This study examined the changes in saccadic amplitude associated with learning a visual sequence. The oculomotor system gradually adjusts saccadic parameters when tracking a visual stimulus, which has a predictable trajectory. In these contexts, the change in saccadic amplitudes leads to predictive fixations. That is, fixations made to a position…

Can a single adjective immediately influence message-building during sentence processing? We presented participants with 168 sentence contexts, such as "His skin was red from spending the day at the …" Sentences ended with either the most expected word ("beach") or a low cloze probability completion ("pool"). Nouns…

Frequent forced switching between tasks has been shown to reduce switch costs and increase voluntary switch rates. So far, however, the boundary conditions of the influence of forced task switching on voluntary task switching are unknown. Thus, the present study was aimed to test different aspects of generalizability (across items, tasks, and…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

Research suggests that speech-accompanying gestures influence cognitive processes, but it is not clear whether the gestural benefit is specific to the gesturing hand. Two experiments tested the "(right/left) hand-specificity" hypothesis for self-oriented functions of gestures: gestures with a particular hand enhance cognitive processes…

In embodied theories of semantic representation, the processes and mechanisms of modal simulations that are engaged during semantic processing have tended to be underspecified. We investigated the possibility that motor imagery may be a mechanism of simulation, using an individual differences approach. In this preregistered study, we assessed…

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the…

Semantic distance is a determining factor in cognitive processes, such as semantic priming, operating upon semantic memory. The main computational approach to compute semantic distance is through latent semantic analysis (LSA). However, objections have been raised against this approach, mainly in its failure at predicting semantic priming. We…

Research has shown that consistently right-handed individuals have poorer memory than do inconsistently right- or left-handed individuals under baseline conditions but more reliably exhibit enhanced memory retrieval after making a series of saccadic eye movements. From this it could be that consistent versus inconsistent handedness, regardless of…

Throughout a lifetime of interaction with the physical environment, people develop a strong bias to respond on the same side as the location of a target object, even when its location is irrelevant to the task at hand. Recent research has shown that this compatibility bias can be overridden with relatively brief but focused training. To better…

It has been proposed that switch costs in task switching reflect the strengthening of task-related associations and that strengthening is triggered by response execution. The present study tested the hypothesis that only task-related responses are able to trigger strengthening. Effects of task strengthening caused by error corrections were…

In almost all daily activities fingers of both hands are used in coordinated succession. The present experiments explored whether learning in such tasks pertains not only to the overall sequence spanning both hands but also to the constituent sequences of each hand. In a serial reaction time task, 2 repeating hand-related sequences were…