The Accumulated Clues Task (ACT): Development of a German Semantic Problem-Solving Paradigm.

The Accumulated Clues Task (ACT; Bowers et al., 1990) is a semantic problem-solving paradigm that has primarily been used in research on intuitive processes and as an experimental model of insight. In this incremental task, participants are instructed to find a solution word that is implied by a list of clue words with increasing semantic proximity to the solution word. We present a German version of the ACT, consisting of 20 word lists with 15 clues each, and report norming studies testing its psychometric properties and their relations to psycholinguistic features of the stimulus material (total N = 300). The results are reported and discussed for future research employing this stimulus pool, which can be easily adapted to varying experimental set-ups and research questions.

On the emergence of the in-out effect across trials: two items do the trick.

Individuals prefer letter strings whose consonantal articulation spots move from the front of the mouth to the back (e.g., BAKA, inward) over those with a reversed consonant order (e.g., KABA, outward), the so-called in-out effect. The present research explores whether individuals hold an internal standard or scheme of consonant order that triggers this effect. If this were the case, the in-out effect should already occur in one-trial between-subjects designs. If not, the in-out effect should emerge over the course of trials in within-subjects designs. In Experiments 1a-e (1b-e preregistered; total N = 2973; German, English, and Portuguese samples) employing a one-trial between-subjects design, no in-out effect was found. In Experiment 2 (N = 253), employing within-subjects designs with either 1, 5, 10, 30, or 50 trials per consonant order category (inward vs. outward), the in-out effect was absent in the first trial, but already surfaced for the first 2 trials, reached significance within the first 10 trials and a solid plateau within the first 20 trials. Of the four theoretical explanations, the present evidence favors the fluency/frequency and letter-position accounts and is at odds with the eating-related embodiment and easy-first accounts.

The impact of horizontal and vertical Luminance SNARC compatibility on affective judgments.

Research on the Spatial Quantity Association of Response Codes (SQUARC) has documented associations between spatial position and mental representations of quantity. Large quantities are associated with right and top, small quantities are associated with left and bottom. Resulting compatibility effects have largely been documented for response speed and judgment accuracy. Recently, employing luminance as quantity, Löffler et al. (2022) generalised such SQUARC compatibility effects to affective judgments, showing that horizontally SQUARC-compatible stimulus arrangements (i.e. bright on the right, dark on the left side) are liked more than SQUARC-incompatible arrangements. The present Experiment 1 (N = 296) replicated this horizontal compatibility effect, dz = .18, and generalised it to vertical luminance SQUARC compatibility (i.e. bright on the top, dark on the bottom), dz = .22. Experiments 2a-b (total N = 259; Experiment 2b preregistered) employed stimulus arrangements tilted by 45° to manipulate horizontal and vertical (in)compatibility simultaneously within the same stimulus, finding robust horizontal compatibility effects, but mixed evidence regarding vertical compatibility.

Bright on the right feels right: SQUARC compatibility is hedonically marked.

According to the Spatial Quantity Association of Response Codes (SQUARC), people hold a mental association between horizontal position and quantity (lower quantities left, higher quantities right). While a large body of research has explored this effect for response speed and judgment accuracy, the affective downstream consequences of the SQUARC remain unexplored. Aiming to address this gap, the present two experiments (pre-registered, total N = 521) investigated whether stimulus arrangements that are compatible with the SQUARC for luminance are affectively preferred to stimulus arrangements that are incompatible. SQUARC-compatible square arrangements (dark-left, bright-right) were preferred over SQUARC-incompatible square arrangements (dark-right, bright-left). The preference for SQUARC compatibility was not moderated by the horizontal orientation of the response scale. Our results confirm the direction of the spatial-luminance association and provide initial support that the cognitive processing of SQUARC compatibility is hedonically marked and appears sufficient to impact affective evaluations.