Communicating abstract meaning: concepts revealed in words and gestures.

words refer to concepts that cannot be directly experienced through our senses (e.g. , ).

Testing the Limits of Skill Transfer for Scrabble Experts in Behavior and Brain.

We investigated transfer of the skills developed by competitive Scrabble players. Previous studies reported superior performance for Scrabble experts on the lexical decision task (LDT), suggesting near transfer of Scrabble skills. Here we investigated the potential for far transfer to a symbol decision task (SDT); in particular, transfer of enhanced long-term working memory for vertically presented stimuli.

Grasping the invisible: semantic processing of abstract words.

The problem of how abstract word meanings are represented has been a challenging one. In the present study, we extended the semantic richness approach (e.g.

Richer concepts are better remembered: number of features effects in free recall.

Many models of memory build in a term for encoding variability, the observation that there can be variability in the richness or extensiveness of processing at encoding, and that this variability has consequences for retrieval. In four experiments, we tested the expectation that encoding variability could be driven by the properties of the to-be-remembered item. Specifically, that concepts associated with more semantic features would be better remembered than concepts associated with fewer semantic features.

How a hobby can shape cognition: visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players.

Competitive Scrabble is an activity that involves extraordinary word recognition experience. We investigated whether that experience is associated with exceptional behavior in the laboratory in a classic visual word recognition paradigm: the lexical decision task (LDT). We used a version of the LDT that involved horizontal and vertical presentation and a concreteness manipulation.