Schemas are mental representations of common structures of our experience, and they are centrally important to human thinking and memory. Recently, it has been proposed that schemas also play an important role in structuring our imagination of the future. However, tools for automatically measuring the schematic content of written and spoken event narratives are underdeveloped. Here, we report a preliminary investigation into a set of metrics that may differentiate between more and less schematic narratives. Across two experiments, we find that written and spoken narratives that are schema-congruent are more associative, in that they contain words that are more strongly psychologically associated with one another. We discuss how this finding might contribute to the development of tools to automatically measure schematicity in future narratives.

Optical tweezers are tools made of light that enable contactless pushing, trapping, and manipulation of objects, ranging from atoms to space light sails. Since the pioneering work by Arthur Ashkin in the 1970s, optical tweezers have evolved into sophisticated instruments and have been employed in a broad range of applications in the life sciences, physics, and engineering. These include accurate force and torque measurement at the femtonewton level, microrheology of complex fluids, single micro- and nano-particle spectroscopy, single-cell analysis, and statistical-physics experiments. This roadmap provides insights into current investigations involving optical forces and optical tweezers from their theoretical foundations to designs and setups. It also offers perspectives for applications to a wide range of research fields, from biophysics to space exploration.