Thinking in 3D: A multidimensional mapping of the effects of distance on abstraction.

Despite a large body of research concerning the effects of psychological distance, our understanding about how different dimensions of distance interact and influence cognition is still limited. In this study, we moved beyond first-order approximations of the effects of psychological distance, to map the effects of multidimensional events as they appear in the world. We developed a novel experimental idiographic paradigm in which participants were asked to generate narratives of events.

A computational text analysis investigation of the relation between personal and linguistic agency.

Previous psycholinguistic findings showed that linguistic framing - such as the use of passive voice - influences the level of agency attributed to other people. To investigate whether passive voice use relates to people's personal sense of agency, we conducted three studies in which we analyzed existing experimental and observational data. In Study 1 (N = 835) we show that sense of personal agency, operationalized between participants as recalling instances of having more or less power over others, affects the use of agentive language.

Psychological proximity improves reasoning in academic aptitude tests.

Performance on standardized academic aptitude tests (AAT) can determine important life outcomes. However, it is not clear whether and which aspects of the content of test questions affect performance. We examined the effect of psychological distance embedded in test questions.

Abstract thinking facilitates aggregation of information.

Many situations in life (such as considering which stock to invest in, or which people to befriend) require averaging across series of values. Here, we examined predictions derived from construal level theory, and tested whether abstract compared with concrete thinking facilitates the process of aggregating values into a unified summary representation. In four experiments, participants were induced to think more abstractly (vs.

Concrete mindset impairs filtering in visual working memory.

Two studies tested whether a mindset manipulation would affect the filtering of distractors from entering visual working memory (VWM). In Study 1, participants completed a concrete mindset manipulation (by repeatedly describing how to perform an action), an abstract mindset manipulation (by repeatedly describing why to perform an action), and a baseline condition (no manipulation). In Study 2, some participants completed a concrete mindset manipulation, whereas others completed an abstract manipulation.

Induced Social Power Improves Visual Working Memory.

The possibility that social power improves working memory relative to conditions of powerlessness has been invoked to explain why manipulations of power improve performance in many cognitive tasks. Yet, whether power facilitates working memory performance has never been tested directly. In three studies, we induced high or low sense of power using the episodic recall task and tested participants' visual working memory capacity.

Working Memory Load Affects Processing Time in Spoken Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye-Movements.

In daily life, speech perception is usually accompanied by other tasks that tap into working memory capacity. However, the role of working memory on speech processing is not clear. The goal of this study was to examine how working memory load affects the timeline for spoken word recognition in ideal listening conditions.