Second language learners must often learn categories which may not map well with those of their first language. Prepositions often differ between languages, for example, German uses different words for vertically “on” and horizontally “on” which would be novel to an English-speaker. Additionally, learners must contend with varying degrees of noise in the learning environment. A spatial continuum of images was created depicting prepositions such as “above” and “below” (familiar) or horizontal “on” and vertical “on” (novel). We used an artificial preposition learning task in adult English-speakers to explore both the influence of familiarity (familiar or novel) and the degree of statistical regularity in the learning material (noisy or consistent labeling of continuum steps) on learning outcomes. Our results suggest that learners are sensitive to statistics and familiarity and revealed individual differences in the sensitivity to these statistics, suggesting differences in efficiency of learning novel prepositions.

Words are learned in various contexts and over various timescales throughout our lives. The current study exploredthe role of context in the form of negation in artificial language learning. It was predicted that words trained in an entirelynegated context would show lower average correctness in the testing phase than those trained entirely in the affirmative or inthe combined contexts. Eighteen artificial nouns were trained using the prefixes “an-” meaning “not the” or “o-” meaning “the”to mark negation. In the testing phase, participants were tested without the prefix on word stems only. Findings indicatedwords learned solely in the affirmative context led to a higher average correctness while those learned solely in the presence ofnegation showed the least average correctness in the testing phase.

The current study investigated how lexical priming and negation affects encoding and retrieval of information.Studies have shown people encode and retrieve misinformation from memory, but the mechanisms of encoding and retrieval arenot well understood. To address this, an eye-tracking paradigm was designed to examine probabilistic activation during retrievalof accurate or inaccurate information. Participants read four different kinds of texts that varied by if they were affirmative ornegated and whether they contained accurate or inaccurate information. After participants read all texts, eye fixations weretracked in a visual world paradigm with four plausible answers on screen in each corner to choose from. Suppression wasobserved in groups that did not produce misinformation. When participants answered correctly, despite reading misinformation,we observed misinformation being inhibited instead of primed. Mechanisms of processing true and false information and theinterplay between language and conceptual formation are discussed.

The challenge of predict ing meme success has gained at tention from researchers, largely due to the increased availability of social media data. Many models focus on st ructural features of online social networks as predictors of meme success. The current work takes a different approach, predict ing meme success from linguist ic features. We propose predict ive power is gained by grounding memes in theories of working memory, emot ion, memory, and psycholinguist ics. The linguist ic content of several memes were analyzed with linguist ic analysis tools. These features were then t rained with a mult ilayer supervised backpropagat ion network. A set of new memes was used to test the generalizat ion of the network. Results indicated the network was able to generalize the linguist ic features in order to predict success at greater than chance levels (80% accuracy). Linguist ic features appear to be enough to predict meme t ransmission success without any informat ion about social network st ructure.

Mind wandering is a prevalent but highly subjective phenomenon that is difficult to measure. Typically studies use probes at random points throughout at study that pop in and ask participants “Are you mind wandering” where they indicate yes or no, and then resume the study. This study investigated a method of extracting eye blinks from raw eye tracking data while participants were reading texts that varied in degree of engagingness on a similar topic. Blink durations were found to increase for less engaging texts. We hypothesize that eye blink durations may increase with mind wandering and discuss implications for mind wandering research.