Sound symbolism refers to associations between language sounds (i.e., phonemes) and perceptual and/or semantic features. One example is the maluma/takete effect an association between certain phonemes (e.g., /m/, /u/) and roundness, and others (e.g., /k/, /ɪ/) and spikiness. While this association has been demonstrated in laboratory tasks with nonword stimuli, its presence in existing spoken language is unknown. Here we examined whether the maluma/takete effect is attested in English, across a broad sample of words. Best-worst judgments from 171 university students were used to quantify the shape of 1,757 objects, from spiky to round. We then examined whether the presence of certain phonemes in words predicted the shape of the objects to which they refer. We found evidence that phonemes associated with roundness are more common in words referring to round objects, and phonemes associated with spikiness are more common in words referring to spiky objects. This represents an instance of iconicity, and thus nonarbitrariness, in human language.Humans can automatically detect and learn to exploit repeated aspects (regularities) of the environment. Timing research suggests that such learning is not only used to anticipate what will happen, but also when it will happen. However, in timing experiments, the intervals to be timed are presented in isolation from other stimuli and explicitly cued, contrasting with naturalistic environments in which intervals are embedded in a constant stream of events and individuals are hardly aware of them. It is unclear whether laboratory findings from timing research translate to a more ecologically valid, implicit environment. Here we show in a game-like experiment, specifically designed to measure naturalistic behavior, that participants implicitly use regular intervals to anticipate future events, even when these intervals are constantly interrupted by irregular yet behaviorally relevant events. This finding extends previous research by showing that individuals not only detect such regularities but can also use this knowledge to decide when to act in a complex environment. Furthermore, this finding demonstrates that this type of learning can occur independently from the ordinal sequence of motor actions, which contrasts this work with earlier motor learning studies. Taken together, our results demonstrate that regularities in the time between events are implicitly monitored and used to predict and act on what happens when, thereby showing that laboratory findings from timing research can generalize to naturalistic environments. Additionally, with the development of our game-like experiment, we demonstrate an approach to test cognitive theories in less controlled, ecologically more valid environments.In our daily lives, we make a wide variety of decisions. One major distinction that has been made is between perceptual decisions and value-based (economic) decisions. We argue that this distinction is ill-defined, because these decisions vary on multiple dimensions. We present an alternative way to categorize decisions, based on two dimensions subjective versus objective criteria, and evaluation of a stimulus versus a representation. We experimentally study the decision-making process (with eye-tracking) in each of the four resulting categories, using the same stimulus set of food images.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/Decitabine.html  Using a combination of individual-level and group-level modeling, we find surprisingly consistent patterns of behavior across the categories. However, we find stronger similarities between the subjective and objective categories, and stronger differences between the stimulus and representation categories.Social species rely on the ability to modulate feedback-monitoring in social contexts to adjust one's actions and obtain desired outcomes. When being awarded positive outcomes during a gambling task, feedback-monitoring is attenuated when strangers are rewarded, as less value is assigned to the awarded outcome. This difference in feedback-monitoring can be indexed by an event-related potential (ERP) component known as the Reward Positivity (RewP), whose amplitude is enhanced when receiving positive feedback. While the degree of familiarity influences the RewP, little is known about how the RewP and reinforcement learning are affected when gambling on behalf of familiar versus nonfamiliar agents, such as robots. This question becomes increasingly important given that robots may be used as teachers and/or social companions in the near future, with whom children and adults will interact with for short or long periods of time. In the present study, we examined whether feedback-monitoring when gambling on behalf of oneself compared with a robot is impacted by whether participants have familiarized themselves with the robot before the task. We expected enhanced RewP amplitude for self versus other for those who did not familiarize with the robot and that self-other differences in the RewP would be attenuated for those who familiarized with the robot. Instead, we observed that the RewP was larger when familiarization with the robot occurred, which corresponded to overall worse learning outcomes. We additionally observed an enhanced P3 effect for the high-familiarity condition, which suggests an increased motivation to reward. These findings suggest that familiarization with robots may cause a positive motivational effect, which positively affects RewP amplitudes, but interferes with learning.Psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with a chronic disregard for the welfare of others. The attention bottleneck model of psychopathy asserts that the behavior of individuals higher on psychopathy is due to an exaggerated attention bottleneck that constrains all information processing, regardless of the information's potential goal-relevance. To date, the majority of research on the attention bottleneck model of psychopathy conceptually applied the tenets of the model but did not implement methods that directly test an exaggeration of the bottleneck in psychopathy. Accordingly, the presence of an exaggerated bottleneck, the exact expression of that bottleneck, and its potential mechanistic relevance for behavior in individuals higher on psychopathy remains untested. To address these gaps, a sample of 78 male community members, evaluated for psychopathic traits using the Self-Report Psychopathy-III scale, completed an EEG-based dual-task paradigm examining short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 300 ms), long SOA (1,100 ms), and single-task baseline conditions.