1,720,987 research outputs found
Spatial text processing: are estimates of time and distance influenced by the age of characters and readers?
No full textIt is widely accepted that, while hearing or reading a story, people continuously form and update mental representations of the characters, places and events being described, based on plausible spatial, temporal or intentional details. According to the embodied cognition approach, the mental representations that accompany text reading are grounded in each reader's own sensorimotor experiences. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether readers' estimates of time and distance are influenced by age, their own and that of the character being described. In Experiment 1, 182 young adults read the description of a route in a town being covered by a young or an elderly character. In Experiment 2, the same descriptions as in Experiment 1 were read by 121 young adults and 53 older people. To avoid a possible confound, a follow-up to Experiment 1 (Experiment 1a) repeated the study by removing from texts the adverbs describing the walking speed of characters. In all experiments, participants were asked to estimate: (a) the time the characters took to reach their destinations (time estimation task); and (b) the distance they covered (distance estimation task). The results showed that both characters' and readers' ages influenced the time estimated, whereas no effects were found on estimates of distance: the elderly character was estimated to take longer than the young character (Experiments 1, 1a and 2), and older readers estimated longer times than younger readers (Experiment 2). This prompts the conclusion that personal features of both the readers and the characters they read about were used to infer the temporal dimension of situations described in the narratives. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed
The self in motion: The advantage for one's own movements at an implicit but not explicit level
Full text linkThis study investigated the possible dissociation between implicit and explicit self-motion recognition. Converging evidence suggests that the distinction between self and other in the corporeal domain might rely on the integration of visual and sensorimotor representations of the body. Notably, previous studies have demonstrated that individuals are faster and more accurate in discriminating pictures depicting their own body effectors compared to those of others, the so-called self-advantage effect. Such facilitation has been found when participants had to recognize the bodily self in implicit but not explicit tasks. We hypothesized a similar advantage for implicit discrimination of one's own body movements relative to those of others, due to underlying sensorimotor mechanisms. Participants were presented with pairs of schematic movements (i.e., motion patterns of one's own skeleton and those of other bodies). In the Implicit task, they judged whether the movements were the same or different. In the Explicit task, they judged whether there was or not their own movement. Results showed facilitation in terms of accuracy and response time with movements belonging to the self than to other people in the Implicit task, indicating a self-advantage effect. Such a facilitation did not emerge in the Explicit task. Overall, the present findings disclose the contribution of motor information in self-awareness and body representation, supporting the role of sensorimotor mechanisms in implicit recognition of bodily self
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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