RFCS Paper of the Month

December 2025

Evaluating the AI Tool “Elicit” as a Semi-Automated Second Reviewer for Data Extraction in Systematic Reviews: A Proof-of-Concept

Authors: Frederic Hilkenmeier, Marie Pelzer, Christian Stierle & Jakob Fink-Lamotte

Comment: What makes the paper special is that it tests an AI tool (Elicit) under real “in vivo” systematic-review conditions, not just retrospectively against an artificial benchmark, so the results speak directly to how teams actually work. In a proof-of-concept across 43 studies and 602 data points, Elicit’s extraction accuracy (81.4%) came close to a human reviewer (86.7%) with no statistically reliable difference overall, and most notably, whenever Elicit and the human extracted the same information, it was correct 100% of the time. That simple but powerful finding supports a pragmatic hybrid workflow: use Elicit as a semi-automated second reviewer, then focus human effort on resolving only the flagged discrepancies, potentially cutting verification workload roughly in half without sacrificing quality.

November 2025

Cross-situational learning of sign-like gestures in children and adults: a behavioural and event-related potential study

Authors: Arianna Colombani, Varghese Peter, Yin Mai Qian, Amanda Saksida, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, Outi Tuomainen & Mridula Sharma

Comment: Our study is, to our knowledge, the first to test whether statistical learning mechanisms apply to language expressed through the visual modality, such as gestures. Human communication is inherently multimodal, integrating auditory and visual modalities. Within this system, language develops along a continuum from gesture to speech. A well-established mechanism supporting word learning is the implicit detection of regularities in variable and ambiguous input (statistical learning). Yet, despite the multimodal nature of language, little is known about how this mechanism operates in gesture learning. In this study, we applied a statistical learning paradigm known as cross-situational learning (CSL) to test the acquisition of sign-like (symbolic) gestures. These gestures resemble signs from sign languages but are used alongside speech rather than as part of a sign language system (e.g., babysigns). They constitute a natural component of early vocabulary development, emerging in all children regardless of hearing status. Twenty-four children (8–11 years) and nineteen adults were familiarized with eight word-gesture pairs via CSL. Learning was assessed through behavioral accuracy and ERPs in two yes/no tasks. Both measures indicated successful acquisition, showing that all participants were able to learn gesture forms and associate them with meanings. In particular, this result was supported by the presence of N400 and late positive ERP components, both well-established indices of lexical-semantic processing. We conclude that statistical learning mechanisms can apply to language in the visual modality and that sign-like gestures can be learned through statistical learning, likely reflecting their communicative salience and linguistic relevance. These findings offer preliminary insight into the mechanisms that support the integration of gestures into the language system, offering a basis for future investigations and contributing to the refinement of methods for studying language processing beyond the auditory modality. 

Oktober 2025

Goal-directed behavior and hippocampal activity predict real-life impact of drinking intentions in alcohol use disorder

Authors: Claudia Ebrahimi, Milena Musial, Nuria Doñamayor, Diana Prychynenko, Erik Bode, Rainer Spanagel, Andreas Heinz, Lorenz Deserno, Michael Smolka, Ulrich Ebner-Priemer, Reinhold Kliegl, Tanja Endrass, Markus Reichert, Michael Rapp & Florian Schlagenhauf

Comment: A shift away from goal-directed, model-based behavior is commonly viewed to characterize alcohol use disorder (AUD). Combining ecological momentary assessments with smartphones, experimentally assessed model-based behavior and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that the propensity for goal directed behavior predicts the ability to intentionally reduce alcohol consumption in daily life. Specifically, model-based behavior and its neural signatures in bilateral hippocampus and ventral striatum moderated how well individuals succeeded in aligning their alcohol consumption with their drinking intentions during the following yearThese findings provide evidence for the ecological validity of computational concepts of goal-directed behavior and suggest specific treatment targets for individually tailored interventions to regain control over alcohol use.

September 2025

Prospective associations between coping, benefit-finding and growth, and subjective well-being in youths with chronic health conditions: a two-wave cross-lagged

Authors: Roman von Rezori, Harald Baumeister, Reinhard Holl, Thomas Meissner, Kirsten Minden, Annabel Mueller-Stierlin, Svenja Temming & Petra Warschburger

Comment: Living with a chronic physical illness can be challenging, particularly during adolescence and young adulthood. This paper stands out because it broadens the deficit-oriented perspective on chronic physical illness by focusing on positive adaptation processes and the experience of benefit finding. Using a prospective design involving 498 participants, the paper analyses the relationship between benefit finding and (1) emotion-focused coping strategies and (2) indicators of psychosocial well-being. Not only does the paper demonstrate the significant role of social resources in strengthening benefit finding, it is also based on sophisticated statistical analyses to reveal temporal relationships, thus extending the predominantly cross-sectional evidence base. The paper's publication in the renowned Journal of Pediatric Psychology further underscores its significance. 

August 2025

Training children’s spatial language skills improves their numerical magnitude understanding

Authors: Nadja Lindner, Korbinian Moeller, Frauke Hildebrandt, Marcus Hasselhorn & Jan Lonnemann

Comment: In this paper, we provide first evidence for a causal link between children’s spatial language skills and their numerical magnitude understanding. In a pre-post-test control group design, small groups of four to eight preschool children were trained six times for about 20 min each. The training focused on production and comprehension of the spatial terms in front of, behind, to the left, and to the right. Compared to a non-trained control group, children in the training group showed higher gains in a number words comparison task, in which they were asked to decide which of two numbers was numerically smaller or larger. This effect might be attributed to a mental spatial representation of numerical magnitude information with smaller numbers arranged in front of or to the left of larger numbers.

July 2025

Seriality in word reading: Kinematic insights into beginning and proficient readers

Authors: Elina Rubertus, Anisia Popescu & Aude Noiray

Comment: The study was the third study of my PhD. It is special because of its interdisciplinary approach (which actually impeded publication...): It transfers the expertise in kinematic-phonetic analyses of child speech that I gathered while working on my dissertation project to the topic of reading acquisition - a topic of increasing societal relevance in light of growing numbers of children with reading difficulties. In contrast to the majority of studies on oral reading fluency, we did not only measure reading speed and accuracy, but were able to detect disfluencies in children's tongue movements while reading out loud - even in perceptually fluent utterances. This interdisciplinary finding has implications for current reading models as well as for our understanding of developmental changes of phonological representations, both of which we discuss in the paper. 

June 2025

Extending empirical benchmarks of working memory to children: Insights from an adaptive learning environment

Authors: Şeyma Nur Ertekin, Abe D. Hofman, Han van der Maas, Dora Matzke, Carolin Streitberger & Julia M. Haaf

Comment: In this study, we investigated whether children consistently show similar behavior in working memory tasks as adults. Oberauer and colleagues (2018) surveyed the field of adult working memory research and determined key empirical benchmark findings that are particularly robust. We tested whether these empirical benchmarks can oalso be found in children using a pretty remarkable data set with over 1 million observations from over 9,000 students. We found that many key findings from adults can be replicated. For example, children show the well-known pattern that the first and last items in a set are remembered better than the middle items (i.e., primacy and recency effects). Our work contributes substantially to the fields of working memory, developmental psychology, and educational psychology. We also show how using real-world big educational data can validate experimental findings from the lab.

May 2025

Association of School Social Status with COVID-19 Pandemic-Related Changes and Post-Pandemic Rebounds of Children’s Physical Fitness

Authors: Paula Teich, Fabian Arntz, Toni Wöhrl, Florian Bähr, Kathleen Golle & Reinhold Kliegl

Comment: The contribution of this paper is of high social relevance. It documents that COV ID-19 pandemic effectrs in runing tasks were especially pronounced for students in schools of high socio-economic status (SES). SES was measured with a School Soicial Index provided by the BMJS. The result was a bit of a surprise to me — usually low SES are hurt more by negative events -- but has been replicated.  It also makes sense because COVID-19 constraints took awaay many more opportunities in high-SES areas. There were more sports clubs and schools tend to be better in these areas. So they had more to lose. The results also show that recovery from Covid-19 pandemic effects has occurred only for one of the tasks, but, for example, not for the 6-minute-run, that is the critical indicator for cardiorespiratory fitness. 

April 2025

Ready for translation: non-invasive auricular vagus nerve stimulation inhibits psychophysiological indices of stimulus-specific fear and facilitates responding to repeated exposure in phobic individuals

Authors: Christoph Szeska, Kai Klepzig, Alfons O. Hamm & Mathias Weymar 

Comment: In our paper, we built upon previous rodent research and examined (for the first time in humans) whether and how the non-invasive stimulation of the vagus nerve may invoke an inhibition of cortically- and subcortically-mediated fear responses in spider phobic patients during in-vivo and in-vitro threat exposure. We not only demonstrate that the non-invasive stimulation of a peripheral nerve attenuates excessive fear on multiple levels of expression and in a long-term manner, but also provide mechanistic evidence that such effect is related to vagally-mediated noradrenergic activation of neural fear extinction circuits. 
Our work represents an important milestone to translational neuroscience: Since it was found in animals that invasive vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) has the potential to foster the extinction of conditioned fear by invoking plasticity in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, it was endeavored to translate this technique to humans. While over the past years a growing body of preclinical human research replicated animal literature and showed, that non-invasive VNS indeed promotes the extinction of conditioned fear, a clinical transfer and thorough mechanistic insights into this technique have been lacking. The findings outlined in our manuscript thus not only extend the growing body of literature on fear extinction mechanisms, but also provide an important link between animal and human research and finally present a promising avenue for the development of novel therapeutic interventions for anxiety disorders.

March 2025

Postnatal dependency as the foundation of social learning in humans

Author: Christian Kliesch

Comment: The paper provides a novel conception of the role of infants’ early post-natal environment on the development of human social learning abilities. Rather than appealing to specific cognitive adaptations, it proposes that humans’ unique developmental trajectory limits infants’ ability to explore their environment on their own, and instead provides them with the ability to explore the world through others. As I show in the paper, this developmental trajectory is substantially different to that of other species, including even our closest living relatives. Referring to work in embodied cognition, the paper further suggests that this trajectory puts human infants into a position where they can learn to integrate others and the opportunities for action and exploration into their own sensori-motor representations. Therefore, this paper combines recent perspectives from evolutionary, developmental, and radically embodied perspectives to provide a novel explanation of higher order cognitive skills, such as social learning. 

February 2025

Bayes Factor vs. Posterior Predictive Model Assessment: Insights from Ordinal Constraints

Authors: Julia M. Haaf, Fayette Klaassen & Jeffrey N. Rouder

Comment: This is a statistical paper comparing two modes of Bayesian inference, Bayes factor and posterior predictive methods. There is a heated discussion among Bayesians on this topic that is ongoing for at least a decade. The novelty of this paper is connecting the debate to theoretical considerations from social sciences, particularly psychology. The key takeaway is: Whenever the to-be-compared models include overlapping ordinal constraints (say a parameter is positive in model 1 but can be positive or negative in model 2), then posterior predictive methods are not able to provide consistent inference, but Bayes factor is. We show in three accessible examples when this might be problematic. I think the paper is an accessible discussion of a complicated statistical issue. There also is a critical philosophical argument: How we specify statistical models should primarily be a matter of theoretical considerations answering a specific research question, not whether the tool of statistical inference can accommodate it. Theory first, statistics second. On a personal note, the paper is special because it took me several years to write it (and especially to revise it).

January 2025

German infants’ discrimination of the English /æ/-/ɛ/ contrast: Evidence from a cross-sectional and a longitudinal study

Authors: Hiromasa Kotera, Ghada Khattab, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan & Barbara Höhle

Comment:  This study is the first to demonstrate that short-term exposure to non-native sound contrasts can influence the direction of asymmetric perception in infants. We examined German infants’ ability to discriminate the English contrast /æ/ and /ɛ/ at three age ranges: 5-6, 8-9, and 12-13 months, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches. In the cross-sectional group, 5-6-month-olds showed no signs, 8-9-month-olds showed slight signs, and 12-13-month-olds showed significant signs of discrimination. Notably, at 8-9 and 12-13 months, infants discriminated the contrast only when the sound changed from /ɛ/ to /æ/, aligning with previous findings suggesting that changes from central to peripheral vowels in the F1/F2 vowel space are easier to recognize than the reverse (Polka & Bohn, 1996). In the longitudinal group, 5-6- and 8-9-month-olds did not show discrimination, while 12-13-month-olds did, but only when the sound changed from /æ/ to /ɛ/. We propose that the 12-13-month-olds in the longitudinal group began to perceive /æ/ as a non-prototypical version of /ɛ/ due to short-term exposure during the earlier sessions. Previous research suggests that changes from non-prototype to prototype sounds are easier than the reverse (Kuhl, 1991). Results from both cross-sectional and longitudinal groups indicate that discrimination abilities are not robust until the end of the first year. This challenges the classical view of perceptual attunement, which suggests that infants often lose the ability to discriminate non-native contrasts during the first year but aligns with recent findings suggesting that the discrimination of subtle non-native contrasts may be difficult for young infants and requires some language experience.

December 2023

clembench: Using Game Play to Evaluate Chat-Optimized Language Models as Conversational Agents

Authors: Kranti Chalamalasetti, Jana Götze, Sherzod Hakimov, Brielen Madureira, Philipp Sadler & David Schlangen

Comment: This paper is the first to propose a measuring framework for testing large language models (LLMs) as interactive, dynamic agent models. LLMs have shown impressive abilities in the last years, but this impression often comes from unsystematic testing and anecdotal evidence. This paper sets up a systematic testing framework for interactive tasks (framed as conversational "games"), implements various such games targetted at different interactional capabilities, and tests a large variety of LLMs. The results show that the best commercial models show beginnings of agentive abilities (and are much better than current open-weight models), but still decidedly fall short of human performance.

The N400 is elicited by meaning changes but not synonym substitutions: Evidence from Persian phrasal verbs

Autoren: Katherine Stone, Naghmeh Khaleghi & Milena Rabovsky

Kommentar: The paper compares unexpected words in a sentence, one a synonym of the most expected word based on the context, the other a word that changes the expected meaning. Between the two equally unexpected words, only the word that changed the meaning of the sentence triggered an N400. This suggests that the N400 is more attuned to meaning than the specific form of a word. Some nice features of the paper are that it uses Persian---the diaspora in Berlin and Potsdam were very excited to participate!---and has open data and code.

November 2023

Philippine Psycholinguistics

Authors: Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara & Rowena Garcia

Comment: My co-author and I had been invited to write this review, and we took this challenge thinking about what could have helped our younger researcher selves in starting to conduct studies on Philippine languages. We are proud of this paper because we think it is a good entry point for those in formal linguistics and related fields to know more about the few psycholinguistic studies that have already been done in Philippine languages, and for those in psycholinguistics to know more about the interesting properties of this language group. This paper will hopefully encourage and make it easier for researchers to investigate these understudied languages. I am additionally proud because in this paper, we could showcase our own studies from the University of Potsdam, which are pioneering work on children’s acquisition of Tagalog.

October 2023

The Longitudinal Interplay between Adverse Peer Experiences and Self-Regulation Facets: A Prospective Analysis during Middle Childhood

Authors: Nele Westermann, Robert Busching, Annette M. Klein & Petra Warschburger

Comment: Positive peer experiences and self-regulation (SR) skills are crucial for children's healthy development, but little is known about how they interact during middle childhood. Therefore, we examined the prospective links between adverse peer experiences (APEs) and SR, drawing from the dataset of the PIER study. Across three measurement points, 1654 children aged 6–11 (T1), 7–11 (T2), and 9–13 years (T3) were included. We assessed the SR facets updating, flexibility, inhibition, emotional reactivity, inhibitory control, and planning using computerized tasks, parent- and teacher-reports. The latent variable of APEs consisted of measures of peer victimization and peer rejection assessed via self-, parent-, and teacher-report. Separate cross-lagged panel models were calculated, investigating the interplay of each SR facet and APEs. Results indicated that experiencing more APEs at T1 predicted higher emotional reactivity, and lower inhibition, inhibitory control, updating, and flexibility at T2. More APEs at T2 predicted higher emotional reactivity and lower planning at T3. Lower inhibition, updating, and flexibility at T2 predicted more APEs at T3. Accordingly, we found a negative bidirectional relationship between inhibition, updating, and flexibility with APEs. Our findings highlight that during middle childhood more APEs predict lower SR, which in turn predicts more experiences of peer victimization and rejection.

September 2023

Object labeling and disambiguation in 4-month-old infants

Authors: Amanda Saksida & Alan Langus

Comment: Word learning is generally thought to start around infants’ first birthday. However, recent studies suggest that infants as young as 6-months-of-age already know some common words. In this paper, we investigate whether some of the abilities necessary for word learning could therefore be present during the first months of life. Specifically, we test whether 4-month-old infants can rapidly associate linguistic labels to visual referents and whether they show some preliminary evidence for mutual exclusivity: i.e., the ability to disregard objects that have already been named as potential referents for novel words. In 4 experiments, we show that 4-month-old infants can associate a nonce word to an object or its movement after a single brief exposure. We also show that infants will subsequently ignore the object and movement for which they have learned the word as a referent for other novel words. This shows that some of the core abilities for word learning are present before infants know the meaning of any words. Importantly, we also show that these early word-learning abilities only work with linguistic sounds (i.e., nonce words), but not with non-linguistic sounds that have the complexity of spoken language (i.e., sinewave speech). Our results suggest that the ability to acquire words emerges much earlier in development than previously thought, and that the mechanisms infants use for word-learning are specific to spoken language.

August 2023

Investigating the influence of body movements on children's mental arithmetic performance

Authors: Elena Sixtus, Nadja Lindner, Karolina Lohse & Jan Lonnemann

Comment: The development of number concepts and arithmetic learning are presumably shaped by sensorimotor experiences. Previous literature characterized mental arithmetic as “motion along a path”, where it might constitute shifts in attention along a mental number line. The present study investigates whether movements in physical space influence mental arithmetic in primary school children, and whether the expected effect depends on concurrency of body movements and mental arithmetic. After turning their body towards the left or right, 48 children aged 8 to 10 years solved simple subtraction and addition problems. Meanwhile, they either walked or stood still and looked towards the respective direction. We report a congruency effect between body orientation and operation type, i.e., higher performance for the combinations leftward orientation and subtraction and rightward orientation and addition. We found no significant difference between walking and looking conditions. The present results suggest that mental arithmetic in children is influenced by preceding sensorimotor cues and not necessarily by concurrent body movements.

July 2023

Regular rhythmic primes improve sentence repetition in children with developmental language disorder

Authors: Anna Fiveash, Enikő Ladányi, Julie Camici, Karen Chidiac, Catherine T. Bush, Laure-Hélène Canette, Nathalie Bedoin, Reyna L. Gordon & Barbara Tillmann

Comment: Our study shows the first time that listening to a rhythm with a regular beat improves sentence repetition performance in children with developmental language disorder and with typical development. These results extend previous findings on the facilitative effect of a regular rhythm on grammaticality judgment task performance, and support the view that the structures of musical rhythm and linguistic grammar are processed by shared underlying mechanisms. The findings also motivate future clinical research on the integration of rhythmic stimulation in traditional speech-language therapy to facilitate the treatment of children with developmental language disorder.

June 2023

Shame on me? Love me tender! Inducing and changing shame and fear in social anxiety in an analogous sample

Authors: Jakob Fink-Lamotte, Jürgen Hoyer, Pauline Platter, Christian Stierle & Cornelia Exner

Comment: This paper stands out by validating an online-adopted Autobiographical Emotional Memory Task to induce shame in 115 healthy subjects. Further the results indicate that self-compassion showed a significantly larger reduction in shame compared to an active control condition, with interactions influenced by trait social anxiety and trait self-compassion. These promising findings highlight the value of self-compassion interventions in alleviating intense shame experiences and call for further research in the field.

May 2023

Gaze patterns reflect and predict expertise in dynamic echocardiographic imaging

Authors: Jochen Laubrock, Alexander Krutz, Jonathan Nübel & Sebastian Spethmann

Comment: Dynamic echocardiography – ultrasound movies of the heart – is the most important imaging method for judging heart function. We temporarily set up our eyetracking lab at Charité to observe experts when viewing such ultrasound movies of patients and healthy controls, and compared them to a group of beginning medical students. Using signal detection measures we show that experts are indeed much better in diagnosing the health status. Eyetracking reveals that this is because experts focus their attention on diagnostically relevant regions, whereas students are distracted by salient but diagnostically irrelevant moving elements such as the mitral valve. Using machine learning, we identified the most relevant predictors from gaze data and built a predictive model from which we derive a numerical expertise score that can be used in education and assessment. Results may further be useful for the design of echocardiography user interfaces.

April 2023

A sensorimotor perspective on numerical cognition

Authors: Elena Sixtus, Florian Krause, Oliver Lindemann, Martin Fischer

Comment: With this paper we aim to unify existing knowledge in the field of embodied numerical cognition and reconcile it with more traditional accounts. Numerical information is usually encountered in one of three symbolic formats: number words (e.g. “seven”), numerals (e.g. “7”) and sensorimotor symbols (e.g. holding up 7 fingers). But how does this information become meaningful to us? From an embodied cognition perspective, conceptual knowledge becomes meaningful by relating it to sensorimotor experiences with physical entities in the world. We argue that number symbols evoke not one but three distinct underlying semantic concepts: magnitude (continuous amount), ordinality (position in a sequence) and cardinality (discrete amount). We propose that number comprehension and numerical proficiency emerge from differently grounding these three numerical core concepts in (multiple) sensorimotor experiences. We discuss potential implications for education and treatment/prevention of numerical deficits, and we hope that this proposal stimulates further discussion as well as future research.

March 2023

Music and language in the crib: Early cross-domain effects of experience on categorical perception of prominence in spoken language

Authors: Alan Langus, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, Sandrien van Ommen & Thierry Nazzi

Comment: Die vorliegende Studie zeigt erstmals, dass frühkindliche Musikerfahrung im Elternhaus im Zusammenhang mit Sprachwahrnehmungfähigkeiten im Babyalter steht. Außerdem ist sie die erste, die demonstriert, das Wortbetonung mittels kategoriellen Wahrnehmungsfiltern verarbeitet wird. Die Psycholinguistik stellt seit einigen Jahren vermehrt die Frage, inwieweit nichtsprachliche Erfahrung Sprachverarbeitungsprozesse beeinflusst. So konnte die Forschung mit Erwachsenen zeigen, dass Musikerfahrung zu höheren Sprachleistungen führt – vor allem auf der Ebene der Prosodie. Unerforscht war bisher, ob Säuglinge in der frühen Phase des Spracherwerbs von musikalischem Input im Elternhaus profitieren. In unserer Studie fragten wir Eltern von sechsmonatigen Babys, ob und wie häufig zuhause Instrumente gespielt, Lieder gesungen und Kinderbücher vorgelesen wurden. Außerdem sollten die Eltern ihre Musikalität einschätzen und wie melodisch sie mit ihrem Kind sprachen. Per Eyetracking maßen wir die Pupillengröße der Babys in Reaktion auf Nichtwörter, die sich prosodisch in der Wortbetonung auf einem akustischen Kontinuum kategorisch (GAba vs gaBA) oder nur akustisch (GAba vs GAba) oder gar nicht (GAba vs GAba) unterschieden. Auf Gruppenebene fanden wir keine Reaktion auf Betonungsunterschiede. Jedoch zeigten diejenigen Babys mit überdurchschnittlicher kindgerichteter Musik- und Spracherfahrung starke Effekte der kategoriellen Wahrnehmung: Ihre Pupillen reagierten deutlich auf Betonungsunterschiede (GAba vs gaBA), aber nicht auf akustische Unterschiede. Interessanterweise waren kindgerichtete musikalische und sprachliche Aktivitäten der Eltern nicht korreliert. Augenscheinlich legen die meisten Eltern entweder auf musikalischen oder sprachlichen Input wert. Dennoch war es genau die Kombination aus beidem, die Babys mit starken Prosodiewahrnehmungsfähigkeiten erfahren hatten. Da die Prosodie ein wichtiger Wegbereiter für den Aufbau von Lexikon und Syntax ist, ist der vorliegende Befund zentral für die Spracherwerbsforschung: Sollte der Spracherwerbsverlauf tatsächlich positiv von musikalischen Aktivitäten beeinflusst werden können, wäre dies fundamental für unser Verständnis der Rolle von Erfahrung in kognitiven Prozessen und könnte Anwendungspotential in Erziehung und Bildung bergen.

February 2023

Space-valence mapping of social concepts: Do we arrange negative and positive ethnic stereotypes from left to right?

Authors: Katharina Kühne, Kristina Nenaschew & Alex Miklashevsky

Comment: Unser Körper trägt mehr zu unserer Kognition bei, als wir gewöhnlich annehmen. Die Körperspezifitätshypothese besagt beispielsweise, dass Rechtshänder*innen positive Konzepte mit der rechten Seite und negative Konzepte mit der linken Seite des Körpers assoziieren. Dieses Phänomen wurde mit verschiedenen Reizen nachgewiesen: Musikstücke, Zeichnungen und sogar Lebensmittel. Allerdings wurde sozialen Konzepten, wie z. B. Stereotypen, bisher wenig Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt. Dabei haben negative Stereotypen gegenüber Ethnien, Geschlechtern oder bestimmten anderen Gruppen weitreichende Folgen für persönliche Entscheidungen und die gesamte Gesellschaft. In Anlehnung an die Körperspezifitätshypothese postulierten wir, dass negative ethnische Stereotypen gegenüber einer Fremdgruppe mit der linken Seite und positive Stereotypen gegenüber der eigenen Gruppe mit der rechten Seite assoziiert werden. Unser Ziel war es, diese Zuordnung von Stereotypen im horizontalen Raum mit einer impliziten Aufgabe zu finden, die frei von den Nachteilen bisheriger Methoden ist. Wir dachten auch an mögliche Interventionen zur Änderung impliziter Einstellungen durch Manipulation des Raumparameters. Zum ersten Mal verwendeten wir sprachliche Reize, um diese Assoziation zu bewerten. Zunächst haben wir mit einem Impliziten Assoziationstest die positiven bzw. negativen Stereotypen deutscher Studierenden gegenüber Deutschen bzw. Arabern gemessen. Dann baten wir dieselben Teilnehmer*innen, Sätze mit arabischen und deutschen Namen durch Drücken der linken oder rechten Taste als sinnvoll oder nicht sinnvoll zu bewerten. Überraschenderweise konnten wir keine Zuordnung von negativen und positiven Stereotypen auf der horizontalen Dimension finden. Wahrscheinlich werden Stereotypen aufgrund ihrer komplexen Struktur oder ihrer abstrakten Verarbeitungsebene nicht automatisch mit der linken oder rechten Seite des Körpers assoziiert. Diese Studie ist einer der ersten Schritte zum Verständnis der Verkörperung komplexer sozialer Konstrukte.

January 2023

On Trees Blocking Roads and Cameras Recording Burglars: An Experimental Comparison of the Availability of Inverse Scope in English and German

Authors: Mareike Philipp & Malte Zimmermann

Comment: In this paper, we present a cross-linguistic investigation of English and German regarding the phenomenon of quantifier scope ambiguites in doubly-quantified sentences. The literature offers specific claims about the cross-linguistic pattern: only English is predicted to give rise to this type of ambiguities in the sentence types we investigated, while German is not, due to its free word order (e.g. Frey 1993, Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2012). In order to test this cross-linguistic prediction, we ran the same experiment in both English and German. We further tested the impact of two factors in each language: embedding and plausibility. The relevance of this paper is characterized by novel experimental data, which contradicts two important claims in the literature: (i) German is not categorically different from English and allows for inverse readings, despite its free worder; (ii) a relative clause embedding does not fully block inverse readings in either language, contra longstanding wisdom (e.g. May 1977, Huang 1995). The paper is therefore of major theoretical relevance: Observation (i) supports a cross-linguistically unified analysis of the phenomenon of quantifier scope and its underlying mechanism, with language-specific properties resulting in gradual rather than categorical differences between languages. Observation (ii) challenges the status of relative clauses as scope islands and suggests that semantic approaches to inverse readings might in fact be more adequate than the more popular syntactic approach of Quantifier Raising (May 1977, 1985). The experiments further show that plausibility considerations play a major role in scope resolution and that speakers of the same language follow different resolution strategies.

December 2021

The N400 ERP component reflects an error-based implicit learning signal during language comprehension

Authors: Alice Hodapp & Milena Rabovsky

Comment: The functional significance of the N400 ERP component is still actively debated. Based on our implemented computational model simulating N400 amplitudes as an implicit prediction error at the level of meaning, we derived the prediction that larger N400 amplitudes should induce enhanced adaptation, which can be measured as enhanced implicit memory. We tested this model derived prediction by combining a typical N400 paradigm with a subsequent implicit memory test and found that indeed larger N400 amplitudes during sentence reading resulted in stronger implicit memory later on. These results support our computational model of the N400 and demonstrate the close intertwinement of processing and learning during language comprehension. 

November 2021

Communicating the diagnosis of cancer or depression: Results of a randomized controlled online study using video vignettes

Authors: Franziska Kühne, Henriette Fauth, Destina S. Ay-Bryson, Leonie N.C. Visser, & Florian Weck

Comment: Besonders macht die Arbeit, dass sich sowohl körperlich erkrankte Patient:innen (mit Diagnose Krebs) als auch psychisch erkrankte Patient:innen (mit Diagnose Depression) in Videoszenarien hineinversetzten und ihr Erleben wiedergaben. Die in den Videos gesehenen Behandler teilten die jeweilige Diagnose entweder empathisch oder unempathisch mit. Unserer Recherche nach ist dies die erste empirische Studie, die einen direkten Vergleich zwischen der Übermittlung einer körperlichen vs. psychischen Diagnose vornimmt, und dabei Gemeinsamkeiten (wie die Rolle des Interaktionsverhaltens des Behandlers) und Unterschiede (bspw. die affektive Reaktion) herausarbeitet.

October 2021

Variability in sentence comprehension in aphasia in German

Authors: Dorothea Pregla, Paula Lissón, Shravan Vasishth, Frank Burchert, & Nicole Stadie

Comment: Investigations of sentence comprehension in language-impaired and unimpaired adults have revealed intra- and interindividual variability in the occurrence of syntactic effects that have an impact on the performance profile. The effect of syntactic complexity is one example. This behavioral variability is particularly pronounced in individuals with aphasia and thus hinders diagnostics and treatment. The paper provides the first systematic and comprehensive investigation of variability in sentence comprehension in German. Specifically, four different sentence constructions and three different sentence comprehension tasks at two test points were used. Accuracy and reaction time data were collected as dependent variables. Results indicate that for individuals with aphasia variability in the occurrence of syntactic effects persists regardless of sentence construction, task, and test point. In contrast, systematic changes in the occurrence of these effects were observed in language unimpaired control participants. The results of this study provide an important contribution to the hypothesis that impairments in sentence comprehension are caused by a processing deficit and that variable performance patterns in individuals with aphasia can be explained by a highly fluctuating availability of cognitive resources necessary for sentence comprehension. The results, furthermore, contribute to a refinement of diagnostic and treatment protocols.

September 2021

Kinematic boundary cues modulate 12-month-old infants’ segmentation of action sequences: An ERP study

Authors: Matt Hilton, Birgit Elsner & Isabell Wartenburger

Comment: In an interdisciplinary DFG project, UFSKW members examine parallels in early development of cognition (M. Hilton, B. Elsner) and language (I. Wartenburger). This paper is the first to show that an ERP positivity found in infants' speech segmentation (i.e., Closure Positive Shift, CPS) can also be found when 12-month-olds observe sequences of simple actions performed by an animated figure. In particular, the ERP positivity is triggered by infants' perception of kinematic cues that signal a boundary between action units (e.g., lenghtening of the pre-boundary action, a motionless pause). The first important finding is that already 12-month-olds are sensitive to low-level perceptual kinematic cues that are crucial for adults' action segmentation. Second, pre-boundary lenghtening and a silent pause also are typical prosodic boundary cues signalling phrase boundaries in speech segmentation. Therefore, the presented findings support the notion that the cognitive processes driving the electrophysiological correlate of speech segmentation (i.e., the CPS) are not language-specific but rather domain-general.

August 2021

A Bayesian approach to dynamical modeling of eye-movement control in reading of normal, mirrored, and scrambled texts

Authors: Maximilian M. Rabe, Johan Chandra, André Krügel, Stefan A. Seelig, Shravan Vasishth,  & Ralf Engbert

Comment: Das Manuskript in „Psychological Review“ kann als Durchbruch bei der Modellierung der Augenbewegungen beim Lesen betrachtet werden, da zum ersten Mal für ein Blicksteuerungsmodell beim Lesen Bayessche Inferenz zur Untersuchung interindividueller Unterschiede über verschiedene Leseaufgaben hinweg untersucht wurden. Bei den prozess-basierten („dynamischen“) mathematischen Modellen gab es das bisher noch nicht. Die Arbeit inkl. Source Code und Daten ist vollständig in OSF veröffentlicht: https://osf.io/t9sbf/

July 2021

Establishment of emotional memories is mediated by vagal nerve activation: Evidence from non-invasive taVNS

Authors: Carlos Ventura-Bort, Janine Wirkner, Julia Wendt, Alfons O. Hamm, & Mathias Weymar

Comment: Emotionally relevant information elicits stronger and more enduring memories than non-relevant information. Animal research has shown that this memory enhancing effect of emotion is related to the noradrenergic activation in the brain, which is triggered by afferent fibers of the vagus nerve (VN). In the current study, we show that non-invasive transcutaneous auricular VN stimulation enhances recollection-based memory formation specifically for emotionally relevant information as indicated by behavioral and electrophysiological indices. These human findings give novel insights into the mechanisms underlying the establishment of emotional episodic memories by confirming the causal link between the VN and memory formation which may help understand the neural mechanisms underlying disorders associated with altered memory functions and develop treatment options.

June 2021

Quantifying the role of rhythm in infants' language discrimination abilities: A meta-analysis

Authors: Loretta Gasparini, Alan Langus, Sho Tsuji & Natalie Boll-Avetisyan

Comment: Eine zentrale Frage in der Sprachentwicklungsforschung ist, ab wann und wie Kleinkinder ihre Muttersprache erkennen. Eine wichtige Rolle spielt der Sprachrhythmus: Schon Neugeborene differenzieren zwischen verschiedenen Sprachen, wenn sie sich rhythmisch stark voneinander unterscheiden (Nazzi et al., 1998). Rhythmisch ähnliche Sprachen unterscheiden Säuglinge ab einem Alter von vier Monaten (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001). Diese Befunde geben Hinweise auf pränatales Lernen sowie eine Entwicklung besserer Unterscheidungsfähigkeit mit zunehmendem Alter. Aufgrund welcher akustischen Merkmale Säuglinge Sprachrhythmen unterscheiden, bleibt jedoch weitgehend unerforscht. Unsere Studie nutzt die Methode der Metaanalyse, um diese Frage zu beantworten. Unsere Studie demonstriert erstmals, dass Säuglinge Sprachen basierend auf spezifischen akustischen Rhythmus-Metriken unterscheiden. Sie stellt weiterhin einen zentralen Aspekt des Forschungsnarrativs in Frage, da sich die Annahme, dass sich Säuglinge mit zunehmendem Alter weniger auf rhythmische Hinweise verlassen, nicht belegen lässt. Die Arbeit leistet damit einen wesentlichen theoretischen Beitrag zur Spracherwerbsliteratur.

PS: Loretta Gasparini hat mit dieser Studie, bei der es sich um ihre Masterarbeit handelt, im Auswahlverfahren um den Absolventenpreis 2021 der Universität Potsdam den dritten Platz (= drittbeste Masterarbeit) belegt.

May 2021

Semantic richness and density effects on language production: Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence

Authors: Milena Rabovsky, Daniel Schad, & Rasha Abdel Rahman

Comment: This study investigates influences of meaning related variables on language production. Specifically, we study the impact of the richness of semantic representations (measured as the number of semantic features according to semantic feature production norms) and intercorrelational feature density (measured as the degree of intercorrelation of a concept’s features) on behavioral and electrophysiological indicators of object naming. We find that semantic richness facilitates object naming while intercorrelational feature density has an inhibitory influence. Both effects are reflected in an increased posterior positivity in event related brain potentials starting at about 250 ms. The results follow naturally from the assumption of conceptual facilitation and simultaneous lexical competition, and are difficult to explain by language production theories dismissing lexical competition, thus contributing to an active debate concerning the mechanisms involved in language production.

April 2021

Home-based exercise programmes improve physical fitness of healthy older adults: A PRISMA-compliant systematic review and meta-analysis with relevance for COVID-19

Authors: H. Chaabene, O. Prieske, M. Herz, J. Moran, J. Höhne, R. Kliegl, R. Ramirez-Campillo, D.G. Behm, T. Hortobágyi, & U. Granacher 

Comment: In diesem systematischen Übersichtsbeitrag mit Meta-Analyse wurden die Effekte von Heimtraining (engl. home-based training) auf Parameter der körperlichen Fitness bei gesunden älteren Erwachsenen untersucht. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Heimtraining sowohl gesundheitsbezogene (Muskelkraft und Kraftausdauer) als auch fähigkeitsbezogene (Schnellkraft und Gleichgewicht) Komponenten der körperlichen Fitness wirksam verbessern kann. In Zeiten eingeschränkter Mobilität, beispielsweise aufgrund von Pandemien, stellt Heimtraining folglich eine wirksame Alternative dar, um einer durch körperliche Inaktivität verursachten Verschlechterung der Gesundheit und körperlichen Fitness bei gesunden älteren Erwachsenen entgegenzuwirken.

March 2021

Production of prosodic cues in coordinate name sequences addressing varying interlocutors

Authors: Clara Huttenlauch, Carola de Beer, Sandra Hanne, & Isabell Wartenburger 

Comment: The study addresses inter- and intra-speaker variability in the use of durational and f0-related cues in the production of coordinated name sequences with differing internal constituent groupings in German addressed to varying interlocutors, and finds stable prosodic patterns for constituent grouping and only slight interlocutor-induced adaptations, but inter-speaker variability in how the prosodic boundaries were phonetically realized. By exploring differences and commonalities within and across speakers rather than focussing on the "average" speaker the study accounts for the fascinating fact that we are able to communicate successfully despite our individualities.

An Open Science Framework project page (https://osf.io/rnxej/) has been created to store the data and code.

February 2021

Human vs computer: What effect does the source of information have on cognitive performance and achievement goal orientation?

Authors: Nicolas Spatola, Johann Chevalère, & Rebecca Lazarides

Comment: Die Studie befasst sich mit der bislang selten untersuchten Frage, welche Bedeutung die angenommene Quelle spezifischer Rückmeldungsinformationen (Mensch vs. Computer) für die Veränderung kognitiver und motivationaler Prozesse hat. Dabei trägt die Studie zu einem besseren Verständnis der unterschiedlichen sozio-kognitiven Prozesse bei, die sowohl menschliche Interaktionen als auch Mensch-Maschine Interaktionen prägen.

Semantic preview benefit and cost: Evidence from parafoveal fast-priming paradigm

Authors: Jinger Pan, Ming Yan, & Jochen Laubrock

Comment: Bei der Sprachverarbeitung nutzt man Priming (Einzelwortdarbietung) oder Preview Benefit (natürliches Lesen), um das „mentale Lexikon“ zu studieren. Durch einen verwandten Prime wird das Zielwort aktiviert. Nicht passende Kandidaten müssen irgendwann aber auch wieder deaktiviert werden, wenn der Prime nicht mit dem Zielwort identisch ist. Aus Corpusanalysen hat man korrelative Evidenz dafür gewonnen, dass der zeitliche Verlauf von Preview Benefit-Effekten biphasisch ist: zunächst wird ein Eintrag gebahnt und später gehemmt. Hier präsentieren wir die erste experimentelle Evidenz für einen solchen biphasischen Verlauf. Wir haben dazu blickkontingent die Zeit manipuliert, für die ein Preview sichtbar war.

January 2021

Modeling the effects of perisaccadic attention on gaze statistics during scene viewing

Autoren: Lisa Schwetlick, Lars Oliver Martin Rothkegel, Hans Arne Trukenbrod & Ralf Engbert

Kommentar: Das Paper verbindet zwei Forschungstraditionen zu Blickbewegungen. Seit >30 Jahren werden einerseits Aufmerksamkeitsprozesse kurz vor, während und unmittelbar nach Sakkaden untersuchen („mikroskopisch“), andererseits werden Blickbewegungen als Folge von selektiven Aufmerksamkeit in natürlichen Szenen untersucht („makroskopisch"). In dem Artikel wird gezeigt, dass wir Wissen aus beiden Domänen integrieren können und damit sogar die prädiktive Power des Modells verbessern können. Das Paper ist in extrem ansprechender Weise für Open Science aufbereitet worden: http://lisaschwetlick.de/SceneWalk_Model/

Bimodal familiarization re-sensitizes 12-month-old infants to other-race faces

Autoren: Anna Krasotkina, Antonia Götz, Barbara Höhle, & Gudrun Schwarzer

Kommentar: Das Paper entstammt der Arbeit in einem Projekt aus der DFG-Forschergruppe 2253 "Crossing the Borders", und ist gemeinsam von Potsdamer und Gießener Kollegen publiziert. In dieser Arbeit konnten wir zum ersten Mal zeigen, dass ein Lernmechanismus, der statistische Information aus dem Input zur Kategoriebildung nutzt, auch in der Erkennung von Gesichtern wirksam ist. Die Wirksamkeit dieses Lerntyps ist durch vorherige Forschung in der Bildung sprachlicher Kategorien bei Säuglingen gut belegt. Unsere Studie hat jetzt zum ersten Mal gezeigt, dass bei 12 Monate alten Säuglingen diese Art von statistischem Lernen auch ihre Fähigkeit, Gesichter anderer Ethnien zu unterscheiden, beeinflusst. Diese Studie ist ein Baustein unseres Projekt, das Parallelen und Zusammenhänge der Entwicklung von Sprache und Gesichterkennung im frühen Säuglingsalter untersucht.