Previously (Ma et al., 2023), we showed that when two players were cooperating during an online card game, they more successfully shared their intentions with each other. We also measured mouse movements, which revealed that cooperating pairs moved more efficiently, spending less time moving and moving more directly. Even though social interactions increasingly occur online, it remains unclear whether online interactions follow a similar format to in-person ones. In this study, we recreated the previously published online experiment (Ma et al., 2023) in a real-world context to determine whether individuals resolve and create social uncertainty similarly across physical contexts. Eighty-two participants (41 dyads) completed six card games, three cooperatively and three competitively. In each game, players collected cards that matched their goal and guessed what goal the other player was collecting. For each player, we measured card and guess scores (game performance), along with their hand kinematics. Similar to the online study, participants guessed the other player's goal more accurately during cooperation compared with competition (cooperate benefit), and performance improved across games (learning benefit). However, in the real world, player movement was opposite to previous findings, with participants moving slower and less directly when cooperating compared with competing. These differences in movement suggest that social decision-making behaviour is not just context dependent (e.g. competition or cooperation) but also environment dependent, with an in-person environment altering how individuals reduce and create uncertainty. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
While structural priming effects are well documented, their relationship with abstract event structures remains controversial. This study examines how event structure and syntactic usage preferences jointly influence syntactic choice in sentence production, using structural priming of Chinese transitive events. Across three experiments, Chinese participants read aloud priming sentences (displayed alongside event pictures) and then described target pictures. The priming and target events were manipulated as identical, similar, or dissimilar. Half of the priming sentences used verbal predicate structures, while the other half employed high-preferred ba-constructions (Experiment 1), medium-preferred bei-constructions (Experiment 2), or low-preferred gei-constructions (Experiment 3). Results revealed that priming effects were modulated by both event structure and syntactic usage preferences. For ba- and bei-constructions, participants repeated the priming structure more frequently when priming and target events were similar (vs. dissimilar), with further increases for identical events. In contrast, for the dispreferred gei-construction, priming only increased significantly in the identical-event condition, with no difference between similar and dissimilar events. These findings demonstrate that event structure activation influences syntactic choice during grammatical encoding, but this influence is constrained by the strength of syntactic usage preferences. The results highlight the interplay between conceptual (event structure) and linguistic (syntactic usage preference) factors in shaping structural priming. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Attention is not a singular cognitive process, but a collection of distinct yet interactive mechanisms that evolve across the lifespan. Using data from the Combined Attention Systems Test, we examine how different attention networks-alerting, orienting, and executive control-develop uniquely as we age and interact in ways that shape cognitive performance. First, we demonstrate that these networks change in dissociable ways with age, challenging the notion of a uniform attentional decline, revealing instead that different networks follow distinct trajectories. Second, we provide evidence that spatial orienting (both exogenous and endogenous) modulates executive control, reducing cognitive conflict in flanker tasks. Third, we highlight the importance of measurement assumptions in aging research, showing that executive control appears to decline when measured by reaction time alone, but remains stable or even improves when accuracy is considered. These findings underscore the need to disentangle cohort-related strategic differences (e.g., older adults favouring accuracy over speed) from intrinsic neurocognitive aging effects (e.g., general slowing and network desynchronization). By integrating theoretical perspectives with empirical data, this work advances our understanding of attention as a dynamic, multicomponent system that adapts over the lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Current cognitive theories cast attention as a perceptual selection mechanism, largely neglecting the role of the body. We advance an embodied account, proposing that hand position, posture and action readiness systematically shape attentional performance. After outlining the historical shift from selection for perception to selection for action, we sketch a grounded, embodied and situated account of attention. We then review evidence from classic paradigms (Posner, Eriksen, Egly, Stroop), showing that attention signatures (detection, interference, selection, control) are systematically modulated by action readiness, and argue that the traditional 'office-worker' posture underlying these paradigms may have shaped how attention itself has been theoretically conceptualized. We discuss how action-linked visual processes and bodily contributions to cognitive control account for attention modulation and address reliability and contextual challenges. Finally, we propose to integrate physiological measures, motor states and real-world contexts into future research on embodied attention with the aim of eventually reframing attention as a functional enactive process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Previous evidence has shown an important role for semantic diversity in visual word recognition. These results are theoretically relevant, as they suggest that it is not only the mere repetition of word reading (lexical frequency) but also the semantic context in which words are encountered that affects lexical representation of words. In this study, we assess the role of semantic diversity by applying latent semantic analysis to a Spanish database, deriving word values for semantic diversity. Children and adults performed a lexical decision task to 300 words with different values of this variable while controlling the frequency, age of acquisition, and letter length. The results indicate that adults and children respond faster to words with high semantic diversity than those with lower semantic diversity. These results obtained for the first time in Spanish are consistent with previous findings and support the view that the semantic contexts in which words appear contribute to their lexical representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
