EXPRESS: Mapping effects in choice-response and go/nogo variants of the lexical-decision task: A case for polarity correspondence.

Previous research has shown that responses to words are faster and more accurate in the go/nogo version of the lexical-decision task (LDT) than in the choice-response version. This finding has been attributed to reduced response-selection demands in the go/nogo task. Here we test an alternative account assuming similar response-selection demands in the two tasks, but an additional impact of polarity correspondence between stimuli and responses in the go/nogo task. Positive and negative polarities have been described as a frequent characteristic of binary stimulus and response dimensions. Only for the go/nogo version of the LDT an apparent polarity difference between go and nogo responses exists, with go responses having the same polarity as words and nogo responses the same polarity as nonwords. Thus, as compared with the choice-response LDT, in the go/nogo LDT go responses to words should be facilitated by polarity correspondence, and go responses to nonwords should be inhibited by polarity noncorrespondence. In the present study, each participant performed a go/nogo LDT and a choice-response LDT. Responses to words were faster and more accurate than responses to nonwords, and—consistent with the alternative account—this difference was larger in the go/nogo LDT than in the choice-response LDT. An analysis of performance by means of sequential-sampling models, that take into account a decaying influence of irrelevant stimulus features, supported the effect of polarity correspondence in the go/nogo LDT. This analysis suggested an effect in the choice-response LDT as well, though of a smaller size and a faster decay.

Imitation or Polarity Correspondence? Behavioural and Neurophysiological Evidence for the Confounding Influence of Orthogonal Spatial Compatibility on Measures of Automatic Imitation

During social interactions, humans tend to imitate one another involuntarily. To investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms driving this tendency, researchers often employ stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) tasks to assess the influence that action observation has on action execution. This is referred to as automatic imitation (AI). The stimuli used frequently in SRC procedures to elicit AI often confound action-related with other nonsocial influences on behaviour; however, in response to the rotated hand-action stimuli employed increasingly, AI partly reflects unspecific up-right/down-left biases in stimulus-response mapping. Despite an emerging awareness of this confounding orthogonal spatial-compatibility effect, psychological and neuroscientific research into social behaviour continues to employ these stimuli to investigate AI. To increase recognition of this methodological issue, the present study measured the systematic influence of orthogonal spatial effects on behavioural and neurophysiological measures of AI acquired with rotated hand-action stimuli in SRC tasks. In Experiment 1, behavioural data from a large sample revealed that complex orthogonal spatial effects exert an influence on AI over and above any topographical similarity between observed and executed actions. Experiment 2 reproduced this finding in a more systematic, within-subject design, and high-density electroencephalography revealed that electrocortical expressions of AI elicited also are modulated by orthogonal spatial compatibility. Finally, source localisations identified a collection of cortical areas sensitive to this spatial confound, including nodes of the multiple-demand and semantic-control networks. These results indicate that AI measured on SRC procedures with the rotated hand stimuli used commonly might reflect neurocognitive mechanisms associated with spatial associations rather than imitative tendencies.

Polarities influence implicit associations between colour and emotion

Colours are linked to emotional concepts. Research on the effect of red in particular has been extensive, and evidence shows that positive as well as negative associations can be salient in different contexts. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the contextual factor of polarity. According to the polarity-correspondence principle, negative and positive category poles are assigned to the binary response categories (here positive vs. negative valence) and the perceptual dimension (green vs. red) in a discrimination task. Response facilitation occurs only where the conceptual category (valence) and the perceptual feature (colour) share the same pole (i.e., where both are plus or both are minus). We asked participants (n = 140) to classify the valence of green and red words within two types of blocks: (a) where all words were of the same colour (monochromatic conditions) providing no opposition in the perceptual dimension, and (b) where red and green words were randomly mixed (mixed-colour conditions). Our results show that red facilitates responses to negative words when the colour green is present (mixed-colour conditions) but not when it is absent (monochromatic conditions). This is in line with the polarity-correspondence principle, but colour-specific valence-affect associations contribute to the found effects.

Predicting Context-Dependent Cross-Modal Associations with Dimension-Specific Polarity Attributions Part 1 – Brightness and Aggression

Although researchers have repeatedly shown that the meaning of the same concept can vary across different contexts, it has proven difficult to predict when people will assign which meaning to a concept, and which associations will be activated by a concept. Building on the affective theory of meaning (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957) and the polarity correspondence principle (Proctor & Cho, 2006), we propose the dimension-specificity hypothesis with the aim to understand and predict the context-dependency of cross-modal associations. We present three sets of experiments in which we use the dimension-specificity hypothesis to predict the cross-modal associations that should emerge between aggression-related concepts and saturation and brightness. The dimension-specificity hypothesis predicts that cross-modal associations emerge depending upon which affective dimension of meaning (i.e., the evaluation, activity, or potency dimension) is most salient in a specific context. The salience of dimensions of meaning is assumed to depend upon the relative conceptual distances between bipolar opposed concept pairs (e.g., good vs. bad). The dimension-specificity hypothesis proposes that plus and minus polarities will be attributed to the bipolar concepts, and associations between concrete and affective abstract concepts that share plus or minus polarities will become activated. Our data support the emergence of dimension-specific polarity attributions. We discuss the potential of dimension-specific polarity attributions to understand and predict how the context influences the emergence of cross-modal associations.

Polarity Correspondence in Metaphor Congruency Effects: Structural Overlap Predicts Categorization Times for Bi-Polar Concepts Presented in Vertical Space

Previous research has shown that words presented on metaphor congruent locations (e.g., positive words UP on the screen and negative words DOWN on the screen) are categorized faster than words presented on metaphor incongruent stimuli (e.g., positive words DOWN and negative words UP). These findings have been explained in terms of an interference effect: The meaning associated with UP and DOWN vertical space can automatically interfere with the categorization of words with a metaphorically incongruent meaning. The current studies test an alternative explanation for the interaction between the vertical position of abstract concepts and the speed with which these stimuli are categorized. Research on polarity differences (basic asymmetries in the way dimensions are processed) predicts that +polar endpoints of dimensions (e.g., positive, moral, UP) are categorized faster than –polar endpoints of dimensions (e.g., negative, immoral, DOWN). Furthermore, the polarity correspondence principle predicts that stimuli where polarities correspond (e.g., positive words presented UP) provide an additional processing benefit compared to stimuli where polarities do not correspond (e.g., negative words presented UP). A meta-analysis (Study 1) shows that a polarity account provides a better explanation of reaction times patterns in previous studies than an interference explanation. An experiment (Study 2) reveals that controlling for the polarity benefit of +polar words compared to –polar words did not only remove the main effect of word polarity, but also the interaction between word meaning and vertical position due to polarity correspondence. These results reveal that metaphor congruency effects should not be interpreted as automatic associations between vertical locations and word meaning, but are more parsimoniously explained by their structural overlap in polarities.