Month: February 2022

Accessing the States of Enhanced Cognition in a Gaming Context: The Importance of Psychophysiological Arousal

Abstract The goal of this study was to examine activities and experiences where enhanced cognitive states (ECSs), characterized by dramatic boosts in focused attention, could be elicited under specific gaming contexts. In Experiment 1, expert gamers were tested on the attentional blink task before and after playing games of different genres, varying on four game […]

Published on February 17, 2022

Cultural Evolution of Precise and Agreed‐Upon Semantic Conventions in a Multiplayer Gaming App

Abstract The amount of information conveyed by linguistic conventions depends on their precision, yet the codes that humans and other animals use to communicate are quite ambiguous: they may map several vague meanings to the same symbol. How does semantic precision evolve, and what are the constraints that limit it? We address this question using […]

Published on February 17, 2022

The Order of Magnitude: Why SNARC‐like Tasks (Still) Cannot Support a Generalized Magnitude System

Abstract According to proponents of the generalized magnitude system proposal (GMS), SNARC-like effects index spatial mappings of magnitude and provide crucial evidence for the existence of a GMS. Casasanto and Pitt (2019) have argued that these effects, instead, reflect mappings of ordinality, which people compute on the basis of differences among stimuli that vary either […]

Published on February 17, 2022