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 […]

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 […]

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 […]