Collective language creativity as a trade-off between priming and antipriming

It is now a matter of scientific consensus that priming, a recency effect of activation in memory, has a significant impact on language users’ choice of linguistic means. However, it has long remained unclear how priming effects coexist with the creative aspect of language use, and the importance of the latter has been somewhat downplayed. By introducing the results of two experiments, for English and Russian native speakers, this paper seeks to explain the mechanisms establishing balance of priming and language creativity. In study 1, I discuss the notion of collective language creativity that I understand as a product of two major factors interacting: cognitive priming effects and the unsolicited desire of the discourse participants to be linguistically creative, that is, to say what one wants to say using the words that have not yet been used. In study 2, I explore how priming and antipriming effects work together to produce collective language creativity. By means of cluster analysis and Bayesian network modelling, I show that patterns of repetition for both languages differ drastically depending on whether participants of the experiment had to communicate their messages being or not being able to see what others had written before them.

Testing ritual knot tracing for cognitive priming - effects rules out analytic analogy

Testing ritual knot tracing for cognitive priming - effects rules out analytic analogy

Testing ritual knot tracing for cognitive priming - effects rules out analytic analogy

Testing ritual knot tracing for cognitive priming - effects rules out analytic analogy

Testing Symmetrical Knot Tracing for Cognitive Priming Effects Rules out Analytic Analogy

Ritual knots are symmetrical crisscrossing designs that appear in distant cultures around the world. Their independent emergence is plausibly due to shared features of human cognition and experience that such patterns represent. Since empirical investigation of this possibility is lacking in the literature, our aim is to open up this research area. We do so by asking whether the cultural production and appreciation of ritual knots could be conditioned or motivated by alignments and affordances linked to creative human cognition—advanced analogical modeling processes that are themselves often discussed in terms of bidirectional blending and symmetrical mapping. If manual tracing of a traditional knot design had positive priming effects on such reasoning processes, as we hypothesize, this would suggest an explanatory link between the two. To begin testing this hypothesis, we selected a basic, traditional knot design from Tibet, along with three established measures of formal analogical reasoning and one original measure of syntactic preference involving reciprocal constructions. We then undertook a series of cognitive trials testing for potential cognitive benefits of manually tracing the design. We contrasted prime condition results with a control group and an anti-prime condition group. The data show observable effects of time across multiple measures but no significant effects of time or condition, controlling for reported mindfulness. While this rules out the short-term priming effects of enhanced analogical reasoning at the analytic level following brief manual tracing of this design, the research opens the way for further empirical experimentation on the nature and emergence of symmetrical knots and their potential relationships with patterns of human thought.

Effects of thwarted interpersonal needs and acute alcohol consumption on cognition and affect about death

We investigated the effects of thwarted interpersonal needs and acute alcohol consumption on cognitive and affective responses regarding death, with data from 67 students who were drinkers of alcoholic beverages. Each student was randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups distinguished by the presence or absence of both thwarted interpersonal needs and acute alcohol consumption. Cognitive priming bias about death-related risk and fearlessness about death were assessed. Results show significant interaction effects between thwarted interpersonal needs and acute alcohol consumption on cognitive priming bias about death-related risk and fearlessness about death. The findings contribute to explaining how acute alcohol consumption can transform individuals' self-aggressive desire into behavior. Therefore, careful clinical assessment of individuals' frustration in interpersonal relationships and their alcohol consumption is required to prevent risks associated with self-aggressive behavior.

Expectations for tonal cadences: Sensory and cognitive priming effects

Studies examining the formation of melodic and harmonic expectations during music listening have repeatedly demonstrated that a tonal context primes listeners to expect certain (tonally related) continuations over others. However, few such studies have (1) selected stimuli using ready examples of expectancy violation derived from real-world instances of tonal music, (2) provided a consistent account for the influence of sensory and cognitive mechanisms on tonal expectancies by comparing different computational simulations, or (3) combined melodic and harmonic representations in modelling cognitive processes of expectation. To resolve these issues, this study measures expectations for the most recurrent cadence patterns associated with tonal music and then simulates the reported findings using three sensory–cognitive models of auditory expectation. In Experiment 1, participants provided explicit retrospective expectancy ratings both before and after hearing the target melodic tone and chord of the cadential formula. In Experiment 2, participants indicated as quickly as possible whether those target events were in or out of tune relative to the preceding context. Across both experiments, cadences terminating with stable melodic tones and chords elicited the highest expectancy ratings and the fastest and most accurate responses. Moreover, the model simulations supported a cognitive interpretation of tonal processing, in which listeners with exposure to tonal music generate expectations as a consequence of the frequent (co-)occurrence of events on the musical surface.