'So Help Me God'? Does oath swearing in courtroom scenarios impact trial outcomes?

In countries such as Britain and the US, court witnesses must declare they will provide truthful evidence and are often compelled to publicly choose between religious ("oath") and secular ("affirmation") versions of this declaration. Might defendants who opt to swear an oath enjoy more favourable outcomes than those who choose to affirm? Two preliminary, pre-registered survey studies using minimal vignettes (Study 1, N = 443; Study 2, N = 913) indicated that people associate choice of the oath with credible testimony; and that participants, especially religious participants, discriminate against defendants who affirm. In a third, Registered Report study (Study 3, N = 1821), we used a more elaborate audiovisual mock trial paradigm to better estimate the real-world influence of declaration choice.

Does that sound right? A novel method of evaluating models of reading aloud : Rating nonword pronunciations.

Nonword pronunciation is a critical challenge for models of reading aloud but little attention has been given to identifying the best method for assessing model predictions. The most typical approach involves comparing the model's pronunciations of nonwords to pronunciations of the same nonwords by human participants and deeming the model's output correct if it matches with any transcription of the human pronunciations. The present paper introduces a new ratings-based method, in which participants are shown printed nonwords and asked to rate the plausibility of the provided pronunciations, generated here by a speech synthesiser.

Unveiling the boost in the sandwich priming technique.

The masked priming technique (which compares #####-house-HOUSE vs. #####-fight-HOUSE) is the gold-standard tool to examine the initial moments of word processing. Lupker and Davis showed that adding a pre-prime identical to the target produced greater priming effects in the sandwich technique (which compares #####-HOUSE-house-HOUSE vs #####-HOUSE-fight-HOUSE).

Efficacy information influences intention to take COVID-19 vaccine.

Objectives: A successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic requires achieving high levels of vaccine uptake. We tested whether directly contrasting the high efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines with the lower efficacy of the annual flu vaccine would increase intentions to take a COVID-19 vaccine.

Design: A pre-registered online study of 481 participants compared four information conditions: (1) no information; (2) COVID-19 Vaccine Information Only; and COVID-19 Vaccine Information combined with flu vaccine information suggesting either (3) 60% efficacy or (4) 40% efficacy; we measured COVID-19 and flu vaccine intentions along with several other vaccine-related variables.

Vision: What's so special about words?

Readers are sensitive to the statistics of written language. New research suggests that this sensitivity may be driven by the same domain-general mechanisms that enable the visual system to detect statistical regularities in the visual environment.

Is zjudge a better prime for JUDGE than zudge is?: A new evaluation of current orthographic coding models.

Three masked priming paradigms, the conventional masked priming lexical-decision task (Forster & Davis, 1984), the sandwich priming task (Lupker & Davis, 2009), and the masked priming same-different task (Norris & Kinoshita, 2008), were used to investigate priming for a given target (e.g., JUDGE) from primes created by either adding a letter to the beginning of the target (e.

Masked form priming as a function of letter position: An evaluation of current orthographic coding models.

A word's exterior letters, particularly its initial letter, appear to have a special status when reading. Therefore, most orthographic coding models incorporate assumptions giving initial letters and, in some cases, final letters, enhanced importance during the orthographic coding process. In the present article, 3 masked priming experiments were carried out, using the conventional lexical-decision task, the sandwich priming lexical-decision task and the masked priming same-different task, in an attempt to examine a number of those models with a specific focus on the implications of the models' assumptions concerning the different letter positions.

Semantic interpretability does not influence masked priming effects.

Much of the recent masked nonword priming literature demonstrates no difference in priming between affixed and non-affixed nonword primes (e.g., vs.

Evidence from masked-priming that initial identification of brand names is via abstract letter identities.

Although visual-word recognition is often assumed to proceed on the basis of case-invariant letter representations, previous research has shown a role for letter-case in recognizing brand names. One recent study reported early effects of letter-case in a brand-decision task using masked primes (Perea et al., 2015, British Journal of Psychology, 106, 162).

A backwards glance at words: Using reversed-interior masked primes to test models of visual word identification.

The experiments reported here used "Reversed-Interior" (RI) primes (e.g., cetupmor-COMPUTER) in three different masked priming paradigms in order to test between different models of orthographic coding/visual word recognition.

Diagnostic accuracy of Cancer Antigen 125 (CA125) for endometriosis in symptomatic women: A multi-center study.

Study Objective: To assess the diagnostic accuracy of serum Cancer Antigen 125 (CA 125)≥30units/milliliter (u/ml) for diagnosing endometriosis in symptomatic women.

Study Design: Prospective observational cohort study including patients with symptoms of pelvic pain or subfertility undergoing elective diagnostic laparoscopy at two tertiary referral hospitals. We excluded patients suspected to have other gynecological pathology.

Googling endometriosis: a systematic review of information available on the Internet.

Background: The demand for health information online is increasing rapidly without clear governance.

Objective: We aim to evaluate the credibility, quality, readability, and accuracy of online patient information concerning endometriosis.

Study Design: We searched 5 popular Internet search engines: aol.

Variation in outcome reporting in endometriosis trials: a systematic review.

Objective: We reviewed the outcomes and outcome measures reported in randomized controlled trials and their relationship with methodological quality, year of publication, commercial funding, and journal impact factor.

Data Sources: We searched the following sources: (1) Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, (2) Embase, and (3) MEDLINE from inception to November 2014.

Study Eligibility: We included all randomized controlled trials evaluating a surgical intervention with or without a medical adjuvant therapy for the treatment of endometriosis symptoms.

Why do some neurons in cortex respond to information in a selective manner? Insights from artificial neural networks.

Why do some neurons in hippocampus and cortex respond to information in a highly selective manner? It has been hypothesized that neurons in hippocampus encode information in a highly selective manner in order to support fast learning without catastrophic interference, and that neurons in cortex encode information in a highly selective manner in order to co-activate multiple items in short-term memory (STM) without suffering a superposition catastrophe. However, the latter hypothesis is at odds with the widespread view that neural coding in the cortex is highly distributed in order to support generalization. We report a series of simulations that characterize the conditions in which recurrent Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) models of immediate serial can recall novel words.

Preoperative assessment and diagnosis of endometriosis: are we any closer?

Purpose Of Review: The management of endometriosis has progressed vastly with medical treatments providing a large role in controlling endometriosis symptoms. Despite these advances we still lack an accurate noninvasive test to diagnose endometriosis. This has a large role in the delay to diagnosis, management and progression of the disease amongst a population that is choosing to conceive later.

Masked suffix priming and morpheme positional constraints.

Although masked stem priming (e.g., dealer-DEAL) is one of the most established effects in visual word identification, it is less clear whether primes and targets sharing a suffix (e.

Superset versus substitution-letter priming: an evaluation of open-bigram models.

In recent years, a number of models of orthographic coding have been proposed in which the orthographic code consists of a set of units representing bigrams (open-bigram models). Three masked priming experiments were undertaken in an attempt to evaluate this idea: a conventional masked priming experiment, a sandwich priming experiment (Lupker & Davis, 2009) and an experiment involving a masked prime same-different task (Norris & Kinoshita, 2008). Three prime types were used, first-letter superset primes (e.

Neural networks learn highly selective representations in order to overcome the superposition catastrophe.

A key insight from 50 years of neurophysiology is that some neurons in cortex respond to information in a highly selective manner. Why is this? We argue that selective representations support the coactivation of multiple "things" (e.g.

A behavioral database for masked form priming.

Reading involves a process of matching an orthographic input with stored representations in lexical memory. The masked priming paradigm has become a standard tool for investigating this process. Use of existing results from this paradigm can be limited by the precision of the data and the need for cross-experiment comparisons that lack normal experimental controls.

Developing a universal model of reading necessitates cracking the orthographic code.

I argue, contra Frost, that when prime lexicality and target density are considered, it is not clear that there are fundamental differences between form priming effects in Semitic and European languages. Furthermore, identifying and naming printed words in these languages raises common theoretical problems. Solving these problems and developing a universal model of reading necessitates "cracking" the orthographic input code.

Seeing stems everywhere: position-independent identification of stem morphemes.

There is broad consensus that printed complex words are identified on the basis of their constituent morphemes. This fact raises the issue of how the word identification system codes for morpheme position, hence allowing it to distinguish between words like overhang and hangover, and to recognize that preheat is a word, whereas heatpre is not. Recent data have shown that suffixes are identified as morphemes only when they occur at the end of letter strings (Crepaldi, Rastle, & Davis, 2010, "Morphemes in Their Place: Evidence for Position-Specific Identification of Suffixes," Memory & Cognition, 38, 312-321), which supports the general proposal that the word identification system is sensitive to morpheme positional constraints.

Is that what Bayesians believe? reply to Griffiths, Chater, Norris, and Pouget (2012).

Griffiths, Chater, Norris, and Pouget (2012) argue that we have misunderstood the Bayesian approach. In their view, it is rarely the case that researchers are making claims that performance in a given task is near optimal, and few, if any, researchers adopt the theoretical Bayesian perspective according to which the mind or brain is actually performing (or approximating) Bayesian computations. Rather, researchers are said to adopt something more akin to what we called the methodological Bayesian approach, according to which Bayesian models are statistical tools that allow researchers to provide teleological explanations of behavior.

Bayesian just-so stories in psychology and neuroscience.

According to Bayesian theories in psychology and neuroscience, minds and brains are (near) optimal in solving a wide range of tasks. We challenge this view and argue that more traditional, non-Bayesian approaches are more promising. We make 3 main arguments.

An investigation of the role of grapheme units in word recognition.

In most current models of word recognition, the word recognition process is assumed to be driven by the activation of letter units (i.e., that letters are the perceptual units in reading).