The CASA theory no longer applies to desktop computers.

The Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) theory is the most important theoretical contribution that has shaped the field of human-computer interaction. The theory states that humans interact with computers as if they are human, and is the cornerstone on which all social human-machine communication (e.g.

Structural priming persists for (at least) one month in young adults, but not in healthy older adults.

Implicit learning theories suggest that we update syntactic knowledge based on prior experience (e.g., Chang et al.

Do We Take a Robot's Needs into Account? The Effect of Humanization on Prosocial Considerations Toward Other Human Beings and Robots.

Robots are becoming an integral part of society, yet the extent to which we are prosocial toward these nonliving objects is unclear. While previous research shows that we tend to take care of robots in high-risk, high-consequence situations, this has not been investigated in more day-to-day, low-consequence situations. Thus, we utilized an experimental paradigm (the Social Mindfulness "SoMi" paradigm) that involved a trade-off between participants' own interests and their willingness to take their task partner's needs into account.

Structural priming is supported by different components of nondeclarative memory: Evidence from priming across the lifespan.

Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term structural priming effects commonly seen in the literature. We propose that these characteristics are supported by different subcomponents of nondeclarative memory: Perceptual and conceptual nondeclarative memory respectively.

Dissociable effects of prediction and integration during language comprehension: evidence from a large-scale study using brain potentials.

Composing sentence meaning is easier for predictable words than for unpredictable words. Are predictable words genuinely predicted, or simply more plausible and therefore easier to integrate with sentence context? We addressed this persistent and fundamental question using data from a recent, large-scale ( = 334) replication study, by investigating the effects of word predictability and sentence plausibility on the N400, the brain's electrophysiological index of semantic processing. A spatio-temporally fine-grained mixed-effect multiple regression analysis revealed overlapping effects of predictability and plausibility on the N400, albeit with distinct spatio-temporal profiles.

Memory encoding of syntactic information involves domain-general attentional resources: Evidence from dual-task studies.

We investigate the type of attention (domain-general or language-specific) used during syntactic processing. We focus on syntactic priming: In this task, participants listen to a sentence that describes a picture (prime sentence), followed by a picture the participants need to describe (target sentence). We measure the proportion of times participants use the syntactic structure they heard in the prime sentence to describe the current target sentence as a measure of syntactic processing.

Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension.

Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment ('cloze'). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (=334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles.

Changes in alpha activity reveal that social opinion modulates attention allocation during face processing.

Participants' performance differs when conducting a task in the presence of a secondary individual, moreover the opinion the participant has of this individual also plays a role. Using EEG, we investigated how previous interactions with, and evaluations of, an avatar in virtual reality subsequently influenced attentional allocation to the face of that avatar. We focused on changes in the alpha activity as an index of attentional allocation.

The role of nondeclarative memory in the skill for language: Evidence from syntactic priming in patients with amnesia.

Syntactic priming, the phenomenon in which participants adopt the linguistic behaviour of their partner, is widely used in psycholinguistics to investigate syntactic operations. Although the phenomenon of syntactic priming is well documented, the memory system that supports the retention of this syntactic information long enough to influence future utterances, is not as widely investigated. We aim to shed light on this issue by assessing patients with Korsakoff's amnesia on an active-passive syntactic priming task and compare their performance to controls matched in age, education, and premorbid intelligence.

How social opinion influences syntactic processing-An investigation using virtual reality.

The extent to which you adapt your grammatical choices to match that of your interlocutor's (structural priming) can be influenced by the social opinion you have of your interlocutor. However, the direction and reliability of this effect is unclear as different studies have reported seemingly contradictory results. We have operationalized social perception as the ratings of strangeness for different avatars in a virtual reality study.

Does Syntactic Alignment Effectively Influence How Speakers Are Perceived by Their Conversation Partner?

The way we talk can influence how we are perceived by others. Whereas previous studies have started to explore the influence of social goals on syntactic alignment, in the current study, we additionally investigated whether syntactic alignment effectively influences conversation partners' perception of the speaker. To this end, we developed a novel paradigm in which we can measure the effect of social goals on the strength of syntactic alignment for one participant (primed participant), while simultaneously obtaining usable social opinions about them from their conversation partner (the evaluator).

In dialogue with an avatar, language behavior is identical to dialogue with a human partner.

The use of virtual reality (VR) as a methodological tool is becoming increasingly popular in behavioral research as its flexibility allows for a wide range of applications. This new method has not been as widely accepted in the field of psycholinguistics, however, possibly due to the assumption that language processing during human-computer interactions does not accurately reflect human-human interactions. Yet at the same time there is a growing need to study human-human language interactions in a tightly controlled context, which has not been possible using existing methods.

A change detection approach to study visual working memory of the macaque monkey.

A core aspect of working memory is that only a limited amount of information can be held at one time, but the investigations of its underlying neural mechanisms in animal models have been dominated by paradigms requiring the retention of a single memorandum. In humans, the information processing limitations of visual working memory have been studied extensively using a sequential comparison procedure, in which subjects detect a change in a multiple-item array following a retention interval. Here, we adopted this approach to study the working memory ability of the macaque monkey.