Language in the Mind's Eye: Visual Representations and Language Processing

My favorite children’s book was (and still is) Matilda, by Roald Dahl. The story is about Matilda Wormwood, an extraordinarily clever and sweet five year old girl who loves to learn and read. Unfortunately, her unpleasant parents are contemptuous of her inquisitiveness and talent, as is the headmistress of her school, Miss Trunchbull. While Matilda’s parents force her to eat microwave dinners and watch loud game shows on TV, the child-hating Miss Trunchbull sows fear by locking children up in a device called the Chokey (a claustrophobic closet with spikes perforating the walls) or launching them across the schoolyard after swirling them around by their braids. Then, Matilda finds out she has psychokinetic powers and decides to use them to teach her parents and headmistress a lesson. The magic of this book was that it made me feel like being drawn away from reality and into Matilda’s world: I could feel her eagerness to learn and her frustration with her parents, I could see her father’s face and hear him shouting when she super-glued his hat to his head, and I envisioned what it looked like when she used her special powers to make crayons fly and write messages on a chalkboard to scare the life out of Miss Trunchbull. How is this possible? How can abstract symbols such as letters and words on a page come to life, engage you, create vivid images, and make you feel like you experience the described events yourself

Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Language Affects Perceptual Vividness in Memory

We examined whether language affects the strength of a visual representation in memory. Participants studied a picture, read a story about the depicted object, and then selected out of two pictures the one whose transparency level most resembled that of the previously presented picture. The stories contained two linguistic manipulations that have been demonstrated to affect concept availability in memory, i.e., object presence and goal-relevance. The results show that described absence of an object caused people to select the most transparent picture more often than described presence of the object. This effect was not moderated by goal-relevance, suggesting that our paradigm tapped into the perceptual quality of representations rather than, for example, their linguistic availability. We discuss the implications of these findings within a framework of grounded cognition

Method

Here we provide information regarding our research methods (design, procedure, measures)

FPE in vaccination communication

The aim of this project is to investigate (1) whether nonoccurring versus occurring vaccine-related events are processed and remembered differently, and (2) whether and how (non)occurrences impact the perceived importance of information in evaluating a vaccine

Research question and hypothesis

Here we provide an overview of the literature, our research question, and hypothesis in the stage 1 registered report

Data

Here we will provide information regarding our data analysis (incl. exclusion criteria) and share our data

Stop and Think! Exploring the Role of News Truth Discernment, Information Literacy, and Impulsivity in the Effect of Critical Thinking Recommendations on Trust in Fake Covid-19 News

Covid-19-related fake news widely circulates on social media. This is problematic as people commonly do not process information on social media in a very critical manner. Also, when people encounter particular online content several times this tends to increase the content’s trustworthiness, sometimes irrespective of the accuracy of the provided information. Our study aims to explore whether, how, and for whom a simple critical thinking recommendation added to a social media newsfeed can aid people to better discern true news from fake news and reduce their trust in fake news. In an online experiment, 220 participants were exposed to a Twitter newsfeed with true and fake Covid-19-related news messages, either with or without critical thinking recommendations. The findings showed that participants who were exposed to the recommendations showed less trust in fake news messages, which was mediated by an increased accuracy in news truth discernment. Results showed no significant moderating effects of information literacy and impulsivity characteristics. Overall, the findings of this study are promising as this scalable, low-cost intervention might potentially help combat the effects of fake news on social media

Vaccination narratives

In this research we study cognitive mechanisms underlying the potentially persuasive effects of vaccination narrative

Proportion of hits on the most transparent picture per category in Experiment 1.

<p>Object presence represents a within-subjects factor and goal-relevance represents a between-subjects factor. Error bars represent the standard errors of the means.</p