BRAND: Brand recognition and attitude norms database.

Research involving brands has increased substantially in recent decades. However, no extensive and free dataset of consumer responses to branding stimuli exists. The present research develops and validates such a dataset, which we call the Brand Recognition and Attitude Norms Database (BRAND).

Beauty is in the iris: Constricted pupils (enlarged irises) enhance attractiveness.

Physical attractiveness profoundly affects a broad array of life experiences and outcomes, and the eyes are an important determinant of physical attractiveness. We investigated whether a particular feature of the eyes - pupil size - affects perceived attractiveness. We present competing theoretical predictions of whether dilated (larger) or constricted (smaller) pupils should appear more physically attractiveness.

Emotional sound symbolism: Languages rapidly signal valence via phonemes.

Rapidly communicating the emotional valence of stimuli (i.e., negativity or positivity) is vital for averting dangers and acquiring rewards.

Why to treat subjects as fixed effects.

Adelman, Marquis, Sabatos-DeVito, and Estes (2013) collected word naming latencies from 4 participants who read 2,820 words 50 times each. Their recommendation and practice was that R² targets set for models should take into account subject idiosyncrasies as replicable patterns, equivalent to a subjects-as-fixed-effects assumption. In light of an interaction involving subjects, they broke down the interaction into individual subject data.

Emotion and language: valence and arousal affect word recognition.

Emotion influences most aspects of cognition and behavior, but emotional factors are conspicuously absent from current models of word recognition. The influence of emotion on word recognition has mostly been reported in prior studies on the automatic vigilance for negative stimuli, but the precise nature of this relationship is unclear. Various models of automatic vigilance have claimed that the effect of valence on response times is categorical, an inverted U, or interactive with arousal.

Individual differences in reading aloud: a mega-study, item effects, and some models.

Normal individual differences are rarely considered in the modelling of visual word recognition--with item response time effects and neuropsychological disorders being given more emphasis--but such individual differences can inform and test accounts of the processes of reading. We thus had 100 participants read aloud words selected to assess theoretically important item response time effects on an individual basis. Using two major models of reading aloud--DRC and CDP+--we estimated numerical parameters to best model each individual's response times to see if this would allow the models to capture the effects, individual differences in them and the correlations among these individual differences.

Emotion and memory: a recognition advantage for positive and negative words independent of arousal.

Much evidence indicates that emotion enhances memory, but the precise effects of the two primary factors of arousal and valence remain at issue. Moreover, the current knowledge of emotional memory enhancement is based mostly on small samples of extremely emotive stimuli presented in unnaturally high proportions without adequate affective, lexical, and semantic controls. To investigate how emotion affects memory under conditions of natural variation, we tested whether arousal and valence predicted recognition memory for over 2500 words that were not sampled for their emotionality, and we controlled a large variety of lexical and semantic factors.

The unexplained nature of reading.

The effects of properties of words on their reading aloud response times (RTs) are 1 major source of evidence about the reading process. The precision with which such RTs could potentially be predicted by word properties is critical to evaluate our understanding of reading but is often underestimated due to contamination from individual differences. We estimated this precision without such contamination individually for 4 people who each read 2,820 words 50 times each.

The curious case of the refrigerator-TV: similarity and hybridization.

This article examines the role of similarity in the hybridization of concepts, focusing on hybrid products as an applied test case. Hybrid concepts found in natural language, such as singer songwriter, typically combine similar concepts, whereas dissimilar concepts rarely form hybrids. The hybridization of dissimilar concepts in products such as jogging shoe mp3 player and refrigerator TV thus poses a challenge for understanding the process of conceptual combination.

Affective orientation influences memory for emotional and neutral words.

Memory is better for emotional words than for neutral words, but the conditions contributing to emotional memory improvement are not entirely understood. Elsewhere, it has been observed that retrieval of a word is easier when its attributes are congruent with a property assessed during an earlier judgment task. The present study examined whether affective assessment of a word matters to its remembrance.

Confidence mediates the sex difference in mental rotation performance.

On tasks that require the mental rotation of 3-dimensional figures, males typically exhibit higher accuracy than females. Using the most common measure of mental rotation (i.e.

Examining reports of mental health in adults with Williams syndrome.

Prior research suggests that individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have a disposition towards anxiety. Information regarding this is typically derived from parents and carers. The perspectives of the individuals with WS are rarely included in research of this nature.

Sound symbolic naming of novel objects is a graded function.

Although linguistic traditions of the last century assumed that there is no link between sound and meaning (i.e., arbitrariness), recent research has established a nonarbitrary relation between sound and meaning (i.

Integrative and semantic relations equally alleviate age-related associative memory deficits.

Two experiments compared effects of integrative and semantic relations between pairs of words on lexical and memory processes in old age. Integrative relations occur when two dissimilar and unassociated words are linked together to form a coherent phrase (e.g.

Sex differences in semantic categorization.

Sex differences in certain cognitive abilities, including aspects of semantic processing, are well established. However, there have been no reports investigating a sex difference in semantic categorization. A total of 55 men and 58 women each judged 25 exemplars of natural categories (e.

Thematic relations affect similarity via commonalities.

Thematic relations are an important source of perceived similarity. For instance, the rowing theme of boats and oars increases their perceived similarity. The mechanism of this effect, however, has not been specified previously.

Integrative priming occurs rapidly and uncontrollably during lexical processing.

Lexical priming, whereby a prime word facilitates recognition of a related target word (e.g., nurse --> doctor), is typically attributed to association strength, semantic similarity, or compound familiarity.

An asymmetric effect of relational integration on recognition memory.

Two experiments assessed whether conceptual relations (e.g., contains: COOKIE JAR) facilitate the retrieval of concepts (e.

Automatic vigilance for negative words in lexical decision and naming: comment on Larsen, Mercer, and Balota (2006).

An automatic vigilance hypothesis states that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli, and this attention to negative valence disrupts the processing of other stimulus properties. Thus, negative words typically elicit slower color naming, word naming, and lexical decisions than neutral or positive words. Larsen, Mercer, and Balota analyzed the stimuli from 32 published studies, and they found that word valence was confounded with several lexical factors known to affect word recognition.

Individual differences in the perception of similarity and difference.

Thematically related concepts like coffee and milk are judged to be more similar than thematically unrelated concepts like coffee and lemonade. We investigated whether thematic relations exert a small effect that occurs consistently across participants (i.e.

Freeze or flee? Negative stimuli elicit selective responding.

Humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli. A consequence of this automatic vigilance for negative valence is that negative words elicit slower responses than neutral or positive words on a host of cognitive tasks. Some researchers have speculated that negative stimuli elicit a general suppression of motor activity, akin to the freezing response exhibited by animals under threat.

Head up, foot down: object words orient attention to the objects' typical location.

Many objects typically occur in particular locations, and object words encode these spatial associations. We tested whether such object words (e.g.

Metamorphosis: essence, appearance, and behavior in the categorization of natural kinds.

The transformation paradigm (Rips, 1989) was used to contrast causal homeostasis and strict essentialist beliefs about biological kinds. Participants read scenarios describing animals that changed their appearance and behavior through either accidental mutation or developmental maturation and then rated the animals on the basis of similarity, typicality, and category membership both before and after the change. Experiment 1 in the present study replicated the dissociation of typicality and categorization reported by Rips (1989) but also revealed systematic individual differences in categorization.