Affective norms for italian words in older adults: Age differences in ratings of valence, arousal and dominance

In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a less-curved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging. Figure

How Does Featural Salience Affect Semantic Control Processes? A Preliminary Study

Patients with multimodal semantic impairment following stroke (referred to here as ‘semantic aphasia’, SA) are highly sensitive to the cognitive control demands of the task being performed and poor at inhibiting strongly associated distracters and focusing on less dominant aspects of meaning. Here, using feature selection tasks, we tested the role played by a semantic measure of featural salience on the control processes in healthy participants (Experiment 1) and SA patients (Experiment 2). Healthy participants showed a worse performance when the distracter feature was highly salient and the target feature was less salient for the concept, i.e., when there was an interference with voluntary selection of the target feature (Experiment 1). Consistent with these results, the SA patients showed a poorer performance than older controls when the target feature was weakly related to the concept (Experiment 2). In line with the feature-based models of the semantic memory, we discuss these preliminary results in term of greater demands of controlled semantic retrieval when the features are weakly related to the concept in the semantic network

The Stroop legacy: A cautionary tale on methodological issues and a proposed spatial solution

The Stroop task is a seminal paradigm in experimental psychology, so much that various variants of the classical color-word version have been proposed. Here we offer a methodological review of them to emphasize the importance of designing methodologically rigorous Stroop tasks. This is not an end by itself, but it is fundamental to achieve adequate measurement validity, which is currently hindered by methodological heterogeneity and limitations. Among the several Stroop task variants in the literature, our methodological overview shows that the spatial Stroop task is not only a potentially methodologically adequate variant, which can thus assure measuring the Stroop effect with the required validity, but it might even allow researchers to overcome some of the methodological limitations of the classical paradigm due to its use of verbal stimuli. We thus focused on the spatial Stroop tasks in the literature to verify whether they really exploit such inherent potentiality. However, we show that this was generally not the case because only a few of them (1) are purely spatial, (2) ensure both all the three types of conflicts/facilitations (at the stimulus, response, and task levels) and the dimensional overlaps considered fundamental for yielding a complete Stroop effect according to the multiple loci account and Kornblum's theory, respectively, and (3) controlled for low-level binding and priming effects that could bias the estimated Stroop effect. Based on these methodological considerations, we present some examples of spatial Stroop tasks that, in our view, satisfy such requirements and, thus, ensure producing complete Stroop effects

CONcreTEXT @ EVALITA2020: The Concreteness in Context Task

Focus of the CONcreTEXT task is conceptual concreteness: systems were solicited to compute a value expressing to what extent target concepts are concrete (i.e., more or less perceptually salient) within a given context of occurrence. To these ends, we have developed a new dataset which was annotated with concreteness ratings and used as gold standard in the evaluation of systems. Four teams participated in this first edition of the task, with a total of 15 runs submitted.Interestingly, these works extend information on conceptual concreteness available in existing (non contextual) norms derived from human judgments with new knowledge from recently developed neural architectures, in much the same multidisciplinary spirit whereby the CONcreTEXT task was organized

Brain Signatures of Embodied Semantics and Language: A Consensus Paper

According to embodied theories (including embodied, embedded, extended, enacted, situated, and grounded approaches to cognition), language representation is intrinsically linked to our interactions with the world around us, which is reflected in specific brain signatures during language processing and learning. Moving on from the original rivalry of embodied vs. amodal theories, this consensus paper addresses a series of carefully selected questions that aim at determining when and how rather than whether motor and perceptual processes are involved in language processes. We cover a wide range of research areas, from the neurophysiological signatures of embodied semantics, e.g., event-related potentials and fields as well as neural oscillations, to semantic processing and semantic priming effects on concrete and abstract words, to first and second language learning and, finally, the use of virtual reality for examining embodied semantics. Our common aim is to better understand the role of motor and perceptual processes in language representation as indexed by language comprehension and learning. We come to the consensus that, based on seminal research conducted in the field, future directions now call for enhancing the external validity of findings by acknowledging the multimodality, multidimensionality, flexibility and idiosyncrasy of embodied and situated language and semantic processes

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)

Recognition memory and featural similarity between concepts: The pupil's point of view

Differences in pupil dilation are observed for studied compared to new items in recognition memory. According to cognitive load theory, this effect reflects the greater cognitive demands of retrieving contextual information from study phase. Pupil dilation can also occur when new items conceptually related to old ones are erroneously recognized as old, but the aspects of similarity that modulate false memory and related pupil responses remain unclear. We investigated this issue by manipulating the degree of featural similarity between new (unstudied) and old (studied) concepts in an old/new recognition task. We found that new concepts with high similarity were mistakenly identified as old and had greater pupil dilation than those with low similarity, suggesting that pupil dilation reflects the strength of evidence on which recognition judgments are based and, importantly, greater locus coeruleus and prefrontal activity determined by the higher degree of retrieval monitoring involved in recognizing these items